American Schools in the 'Good Old Days'

“The third illusory reason for romanticism about what schools can do is the nostalgic view that many people hold of American public schools in the good old days, when teachers brooked no nonsense and everyone learned their three R’s. After all, just look at the McGuffey Readers that were standard textbooks in the nineteenth century, filled with difficult words and long literary selections. That’s what we expected everyone to be able to read then, right?

Wrong. American schools have never been able to teach everyone how to read, write, and do arithmetic. The myth that they could has arisen because schools a hundred years ago did not have to educate many of the least able. Recall that about half of all adults in 1900 had not reached the eighth grade. To put it another way, only a small portion of those toward the bottom of linguistic ability would have been around to take a NAEP examination if it had been administered to eighth-graders in 1900. Let today’s schools skim off the same part of the distribution, and they would show nearly 100 percent success in attaining the Basic standard in reading.”

--Charles Murray, Real Education, 

[Justin: Just so you know, Murray is not saying that 'the least able' should not be educated. In his book he is simply trying to counter what he regard as the unrealistic, Utopian expectations of some modern educators.]

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Education-Bringing-Americas-Schools/dp/0307405397/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1323520110&sr=1-1