Most high school graduates today take at least biology and chemistry or physics. Compare the difficulty of learning chemistry with the difficulty of learning farming- it's no comparison (speaking as someone who worked on a farm and studied chemistry).
And far more people in 1800 were illiterate, never mind learning advanced science and math. We just never hear from them.
According to the Flynn effect, IQs having been going up on average 3 points a decade:
"IQ tests are updated periodically. For example, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), originally developed in 1949, was updated in 1974, in 1991, and again in 2003. The revised versions are standardized to 100 using new standardization samples. In ordinary use IQ tests are scored with respect to those standardization samples. The only way to compare the difficulty of two versions of a test is to conduct a study in which the same subjects take both versions. Doing so confirms IQ gains over time. The average rate of increase seems to be about three IQ points per decade in the US on tests such as the WISC."
So someone from 1900 appearing today wouldn't just have a different skill set- they would have an effective IQ of 70. They could probably improve that somewhat with better nutrition and training, but they woud fundamentally still be quite different from us.
I was in a college prep track and took algebra as a twelve year old progressing up to calculus in my senior year. In 1800, they wouldn't have even gotten up to that in math. They spent years learning penmanship, which, while difficult and beautiful, is not the equivalant mental stimulation of learning to use a search engine or basic programming.
If you read Henry Mayhew's or Karl Engel's descriptions of what life was like in the Industrial Revolution it's extremely shocking. Six year olds worked in the mills ten or twelve hours a day. Some of our inner city schools make not be doing such a hot job with the basics, but I bet those kids would run circles around their socio-economic 1850s equivalents.
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