Pamela Hobart provides a quick history of grade levels:
Andrew Carnegie was concerned that college professors were having to work far into their dotage, so his Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created a pension system for them.
However, in order to participate in the Carnegie professor pension plan, colleges would be required to standardize both their admissions process and degree offerings. High schools would provide transcript information denominated in “Carnegie units,” each representing 120 hours of class spread over the academic year. Colleges would offer degrees similarly organized around 120 “credit hours,” with most courses equating to 3 credits (approximately 3 hours of class meetings plus ~6 hours of additional work per week, for a ~15-week semester).
Although secondary schools and colleges did naturally use exams to advance and graduate their students, these were not standardized like the mastery tests available today and so they could not serve the function of homogenizing admissions and degree criteria. The few parties advocating for mastery at this time were drowned out of the debate.
[…]
However, by 1938, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had administered comprehensive exams to college students and found that units taken correlated poorly with actual educational attainment. Rather than demonstrating a smooth progression in educational attainment throughout college, a good chunk of freshmen scored at the expected senior level (and vice versa…). By the way, the stagnant score situation in high school is about the same, even today. Seat time simply doesn’t equal learning.
In a foreword to that 1938 Carnegie report, “The Student and His Knowledge,” a commentator predicted that American education would soon migrate to the next level, some system “based upon the attainments of minds thoroughly stored and competent.” Yet, 87 years later, this still hasn’t occurred.
Another example of the Tyranny of the IQ curve.
How randomly caring!
This surely… uhh… prevents the professors from having to work far into their dotage. Somehow. Presumably.
I may be a bit rusty on Mainstream Protestant euphemisms. Is Zeitgeist still an alias for Providence? (https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/10/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-3/ ) Which in turn an euphemism for “done by the Almighty via the hands of Righteous” (delusion of godhood behind dissociation)?
…and “scientific management” is mostly fashion for evenly-spaced rectangular grids?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
Well, it certainly did:
https://malcolmthecynic.wordpress.com/2025/03/18/dont-send-your-kids-to-school/
To be sure, having “the common civic culture” with emigrants assimilated straight into it, as well as too many children with underdeveloped parts of brain necessary to do something non-trivial with hands seems to often interfere with building anything else, but these goals were reached. Why were they desirable, again?
Conspicuously absent in the article: mentions of the Catholics or any other sect-on-sect friction anywhere.
There were just teh Christian Values™, man. Infused via submersion. Nothing to see here.
Then St. Carnegie smiled and began the move to state standardized curriculum, and all this presumably have Gone Slightly Wrong only because of those darn space bats.