A year or two back, my small town in New Hampshire completed the
decades-long process of educational “consolidation” and closed our
last one-room schoolhouse—a fine 1839 clapboard academy atop a hill
overlooking a small settlement. For the last thirty years, it had
been used as the town kindergarten, but now the little ones have
gone downhill to join their siblings in the first-to-eighth grade
school. The town isn’t sure yet what to do with the building, so
the classroom’s been tidied up and decorated with some surviving
artifacts of its illustrious past. On the blackboard is a typical
math exercise of the mid-nineteenth century: “If 46 yards of cloth cost
£53 10s 6d, what is that per yard?” The tattered volume from which
it’s taken sits on a pupil’s desk three rows back, with the names of
several of the town’s oldest families inscribed inside. It’s an
American book published in 1855—a time when children were required
to do compound division not only in their own decimal currency but
in the more awkward coinage of distant lands.

I wonder how many elementary school pupils today could answer that
question? I wonder how many of their teachers could? I wonder how
many would be able to tell you what “sterling” was and of which
country it was the currency? If
you object that, in an
age of computers and calculators, nobody needs to be able to do long
division, the vast army of Americans mortgaged to the hilt and
drowning