Can you solve this mental arithmetic in the 1895 public school of S.Rachinsky Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky?

The quality of education at U.S. public schools is at an all-time low. We now live at a time when students depend more on calculators and Google to calculate very simple arithmetic. Gone are the days of the slide rule and logarithm tables.

Most high students would rather spend more time playing games and texting than reading. Learning is no longer considered fun and some students now want to be the next bitcoin millionaire. Some of these kids know more about popular influencers, movies, and celebrities than they do basic arithmetic, which leads us to some of the rigor students went through in the 1800s.

The image below is mental arithmetic in the public school of S.Rachinsky by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky in 1895. Hats off to the World of Engineering for sharing this on Twitter. Born in 1868 in the village of Shitiki in Smolensk, Russia. Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky was a Russian painter. Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky painted the famous: “Mental Arithmetic. In the Public School of S. Rachinsky.”

Belsky later studied art at the Semyon Rachinsky fine art school at the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra in 1883. He also studied modern painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1884 to 1889, and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1894 to 1895.

In case you’re wondering what the problem on the blackboard is: It is: (10²+11²+12²+13²+14²)/365. Can you solve it?