The information drift

I'm teaching a class in library science again for the first time in years, and this forces me to think deeper thoughts on a typical day than "Will this be the year the Yankees are back?" There was an item filed away in the back of my mind that had been on hold for years. Back in my public library days I had the job of adding item records to old books in the Arizona History room. One book I ran across in passing was the 1895 college catalog for what is now the University of Arizona in Tucson. I happened to look at the requirements for entrance and couldn't believe what I was seeing.

A prospective college student in 1895 was expected to solve quadratic equations, read classics in the original Latin and Greek, and translate works in French. Shortly afterwards, I moved to New York and didn't have access to these catalogs, so I couldn't answer the next question on my mind - "What did they learn after that when they went to college?"

Recently, I found a similar listing thanks to Google's exploding book digitization project. It was for Brown University in 1895 (See link to Google Books. Here are more qualifications for Brown:

"Translation at sight of ordinary pages from Caesar."

"Ovid, 2500 lines."

"Translation into Latin of a continuous passage of English narrative, prepared from some portion of the prescribed prose."

In math, the students only need to know Factors, common divisors and multiples, fractions, ratios and proportions, negative quantities and the interpretation of negative results, the doctrine of exponents, radicals and equations involving radicals, the binomial theory....and so on.

Obviously, if I lived in 1895, the only phrase I'd need to know is "Would you like fries with that?"

What happened? Starting in 1895, the information needs of society shifted just a tiny bit every day - so slowly that nobody noticed until you looked at things over time. It's like watching the moon go across the sky - you can't notice it move, but if you do something for 10 minutes and look back up you'll see that it moved a lot.
By the 1930's universities were starting to use standardize tests for admission. By the late 1940's when the Truman Commission declared college education to be something appropriate for the masses, language requirements were starting to evaporate.

Some time periods caused the center line to shift faster. The information revolution starting in the early 1990's was relatively an "Information Earthquake." Stay tuned because this is going on all around you and the winners will be the ones standing on solid ground by 2010.