>it’s like basic math

Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties?

I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.

I would say that knowing eligibility requirements of the governor of Kentucky without using the internet is useless information to everyone that doesn't work in the Kentucky election office.

The useful skill is being able to find the information on the Internet if you want to run for governor of Kentucky. If you grow up in Kentucky learning it once in seventh grade is sufficient so you know it's a possibility, but will most likely never matter again after that class.

Why do we need this stupid metric of "will I ever use this"? That is a recipe for ignorance. You will never be able to handle novel circumstances if you limit your knowledge to shit you think you will need.

True… but trivia isn't necessarily knowledge

Trivia is defined as “information of little value.” So who determines what is trivia and what isn’t?

The trick is not knowing a lot - but knowing how to find out what you need to know.

Why learn math when we all carry a superhuman calculator in our pocket?

Because it does computation, math is understanding the problem. Even with things like Wolfram Alpha to handle integration and derivation.

Without an understanding of math you can only cargo cult problems. You can get away with being lazy with computation with no real issur but only if you understand the underlying theory.

That's all shit that I am sure I would be able to answer if I had paid attention in class. Which is what they are trying to test.

Obviously the entire test is about what’s taught in class, but distilling it down to the single dimension of “basic math” in your dismissal was what I found interesting.

Because it was the one area I was familiar with. The others... not so much. But if I was in classes contemporary to the test and had paid attention, I probably would have.

I think that was part of the OPs point: in general, we aren’t familiar with all that they were testing for, so cherry-picking the domain you feel comfortable answering kinda proves their point rather than negating it.

Not that it really proves anything in the larger scope they seemed to imply. At least, not anymore than losing on the old show “are you smarter than a fifth grader?”

All of us talking here are probably adults, probably substantially higher performing on average, living in the age of the internet where information for study can be trivially obtained, and discussing a test that was a benchmark for 8th grade education. What percent of incoming 9th graders today do you think could perform at all reasonably on that test?

Most people know that college education has become dramatically "simplified", but fewer seem aware that this is also true of nearly all of our education systems. And it's all for the same reason. When education was not required nor expected, what education that did exist was able to excel and push a group of people who genuinely wanted to learn in ways that are not really possible today, outside of things like elite preparatory academies.

And I think this lesson is extremely important when beginning to think about how education might be reformed. It's easy to say that secondary (or even primary) education should be more sophisticated, without considering the implications of that on the student body. You can't really have widespread exceptional education standards and the expectation that most people should be able to achieve those standards. This is why reforming education is a far bigger task than the current idea of 'throw more money at it' could ever solve.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

Most of the math I could do pretty straightforwardly though I'm unsure of the phrasing in a couple of cases.

Grammar I could probably have done in eighth grade but I forget some of the terminology.

Areas like history, I'd know a fair bit (as an American) but there's a lot of historical essentially trivia that I wouldn't know though may have known at one time.

Some of the double letters and other things in the spelling I'd probably get wrong. That's what red squiggly underlines when typing are for.