16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Monday, October 9, 1911: Had examinations today. Weren’t as hard as I expected they would be.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
It’s always a good sign when you feel good after an exam. It sounds like Grandma probably learned what her teacher wanted her to know. Today we worry so much about student performance—and whether they’ve learned what they were supposed to learn.
A hundred years ago people believed that schools had several purposes. According to a 1911 book:
The public school performs one of its greatest functions in developing common knowledge, habits, and ideals in its future citizens, a function that it could not perform if all school teaching and regulation of conduct were individual. A common standard of knowledge, power, and achievement, to which everyone is expected to conform, helps to mould the life of an individual in a normal way and to fix in his mind and character standards by means of which his achievements and ideals may be guided.
The Making of the Individual (1911) by E.A. Kirkpatrick