I was lucky that my county’s education was also fashioned after the best county in the state, Fairfax, just outside DC. All those questions on the 8th grade test were something we learned. The AP classes were classics, literature, lots of vocabulary, mathematics, chemistry and biology. Still not as rigorous as private schools in America(I found this out in college) but certainly lots of classics memorization and comprehensive thinking. I understand Zinn brought in in 1980, seriously dumbed down the education completely. I finished my formal education in 79, so missed all the dumbing down. My hs teachers escaped, all of them, a few years after I graduated. They saw what was coming, and got out.