In those days, being an educated person meant memorizing a lot of things, because you couldn't haul your library with you everywhere you went, and in any case it didn't have full text search. Separate a modern educated person from google/wikipedia/etc. and see whether they can still converse at the same lavel. Most can't.
There was also a heavy emphasis on a particular subset of history that made up "classical" studies.
Besides the river questions, the history and geography questions were about ancient Greece and Rome.
There was nothing, for example, on medieval or renaissance history. I suspect that a comparable modern student would have a broader understanding of ancient history than what was shown on this test.
I suspect not. A comparable modern student would have been exposed to a broader range of ancient history which would also have been shallower and, having been encouraged to "understand" instead of memorizing any of it, would later be left with no real knowledge of anything specific, therefore no real understanding.
