What’s important to note is that there has been a big shift in the goals and techniques of education. This most famously occured with “common core” math in the US. It was a push to teach math in a more intuitive way, one that directly corresponds with what children already know. You can physically add things together by putting more of them together, and then counting them, so they try to teach addition with that analog in mind.

Prior to common core math, there was “new math,” which anyone under 80 years old assumes has always been the standard. New math was a push to teach math in a more understandable way, one that gradually introduced new concepts to ensure children understood how math works. This was satirized by Tom Leher in his song “New Math.” If you look up the song, you’ll see that new math mostly was implemented by teaching students how base-10 positional notation works, and then using that understanding to present addition and subtraction as logical algorithms.

Prior to new math, the focus of math education was much more about getting the right answer, rather than the skills needed for problem solving using math. This allows for a higher breadth of education, as topics can be covered quickly, but each topic is understood in a shallow way.

If I might say, schools in the past teached VERY badly (beatings were the least) and most of the time they only put people middle classed and above into them, if you were not at least middle class, you were in the mines. So comparing to today, people in the past, comparing socioeconomically, were a lot worst than today.

It’s like comparing poor kids today agains the sons of kings in the middle ages, there were gaps in education, not everyone went to school in the past.

In my experience, if you’re the smartest kid in your class, you’re not smart. You’re just in the wrong class.

Also, if you’re the dumbest kid.

But I’ll spot one further. Standardized testing exists to place students on a curve. You don’t want everyone failing. You don’t want everyone acing the exam. You want to be able to point and say “These are the good schools/students and the bad ones”.

Coincidentally, the wealth, the politics, and the ethnic composition of the districts tend to speak far louder to exam performance. Schools that are targeted for privatization can suddenly find their students doing very poorly, year to year. Schools that have a partisan administrator with friends at Pearson can find themselves doing amazingly well, practically overnight.