They'd have graduated, but not from the stream you went to. They'd have been streamed off to a technical school, taught technical subjects, and would have graduated, often with apprentices' papers as well as a diploma. On the other side of the wall from my computer there's a mirror with a wooden frame chip-carved with egyptian motifs. On the back is a label from the Leeds D---ing School, identifying it as the work of a 19 year old student. The piece appears to have been in an end of year show. From the style, this was some time in the twenties.jim stone wrote:Students as illiterate as the ones
I was describing wouldn't have graduated the public highschools when I was a kid (I graduated in
58). In fact reading and writing were tested by the state and nobody like most graduating
college seniors today could have gotten through.
My point is that this model no longer works. Technology is ubiquitious. These days, you can't be an auto mechanic or a cabinet maker without strong computer science skills, so the kids
who used to be streamed off into trade schools or apprenticeships are now being kept in a more academic stream longer. Industry, which used to a lot of it's own training, now does very little. They want job-ready hires only, which means that the school system has also inherited the task of training those individuals who'd have in your day been hired out of high school and trained on the job.
So, kids who would once have been diverted from college are now encouraged to stay in school to receive as much academic education as they can absorb. Dropouts can't do what the dropouts of your day could, which was to get a job at GM and a middle-class lifestyle to go with it.
However, if you keep more of the less promising students in an academic stream longer, they'll pull the average down. In your day only one kid in ten went on to tertiary education. These days its closer to one in two. If your argument is that the decline is average scores indicates a general decline in ability, it's incorrect. What it actually means is that far more kids are being educated to a higher standard than ever before. The average score has declined because we're now testing kids who'd never have been tested in the past. However, the scores attained by the top ten percent of each cohort - kids who used to the only ones to get to college, but are now only the top 20% - haven't declined at all. In fact, they're rising slightly. It's only this last pairing which is a true apples-to-apples comparison.