I don't think my parents personally taught us much - my mother was poorly educated and my father was a quiet man who we didn't react with us that much. However my mother loved books and she made good and widespread choices when it came to the books she bought for us so even left to our own devices we did learn. She was also wise about toys, for example, I got a chemistry set when I was about 11 years old. My friend said it was OK for her to have little knowledge about science and said there were areas I had little knowledge of. I asked for examples and she said driving and sports. I said I had a basic knowledge of driving even though I have never driven a car in my life. I roughly know how a car works, what the speed limits are, some of the road rules etc. I have basic knowledge. I admit I am terrible at recognising makes of cars. I also have some basic knowledge of sports. For example I understand scoring and rules of tennis, the rules and the team names, and some of the players, in Australian Rules football, I have some knowledge of soccer, I played field hockey at school etc. I guess I am now going to spend all day trying to think of something that I don't have a basic knowledge of. Edited to add - I know very little about computer programming.
In regards to literature, I was shocked when I mentioned having a kid's fishing tournament on base and calling it "Little Ahab's Fishing Tournament" that I was told we couldn't call it that because it was racist!! Racist because Ahab sounds like "Arab". Neither of the two dolts had ANY idea of who Captain Ahab was and when I tried to explain it their blank stares grew even blanker. I mean its one thing if they hadn't ever read Moby Dick, but to not even recognize the name of such an iconic character from American literature was truly baffling to me.
^^^That is like when one official said ""It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole" and some people became offended and asked for an apology. How can anyone not know what a 'black hole' is? And then there was the official who used the term "niggardly" and was accused oof racism.
Yes, it should be classed as basic knowledge - and there is NO good excuse for your best friend not to know that. To say the reason is because she has no interest in science is just something she says to ease her own conscience.
I know my missus had absolutely no interest in history. for a long time she thought the falklands war was the second world war and wasnt even aware about the first world war ( the 1918 one rather then the 39-45 one she thought was the first war). she told me history was dead and it didnt interest her. Heck she thought that russia and the usa went to war in vietnam and in cuba. dam did that take a lot of relearning for her which wasn't easy bearing in mind i had convinced her the haggis was a Scottish animal that roamed the scrublands of Scotland Her geography is just as bad thinking Israel was near Germany for years. but on the other hand she completely baffles me with mathmatics and chemistry stuff
I have a relative who once thought the entire continent of Africa was one country. It's funny how different dumbness bothers us differently. I am fine with doing math but when people say they can't do it it doesn't bother me. But geographical dumbness irritates me a great deal. Just the other day someone said to me, "aren't India and Indonesia the same country?" and they were at least 40. It's true though that people absorb basic knowledge differently. One person can watch a bunch of WWII movies in childhood and know roughly what years WWII took place in. Another person can have no idea. I think I was always facts oriented and absorbed all kinds of trivia and details from vegetating in front of the tv as a kid.
It's the difference between not having an ability to do something versus apathy or aggressive ignorance. If somebody has trouble remembering specific facts, that doesn't bother me; if somebody says History doesn't matter, that bothers me.
I had to explain to a friend the other day the stars were not planets. He thought they all reflected light from the Sun.
I always stressed using an 'expanded vocabulary' with my children, and making sure they were never afraid to ask what something means. They are all very comfortable using 'big words.' My younger daughter is currently working in insurance, where part of her job is sending letters to policyholders. Her boss goes over her e-mails before they go out, and my daughter constantly gets her e-mails corrected. The boss told her the average American reads at a 6th grade level, and that she has to dumb down the e-mails, otherwise she may offend the reader by making them feel stupid. Her boss even told her she's had to go to the dictionary to check the meaning a word or two that my daughter used. I am both very proud of my daughter, and saddened by the poor reading skills in this country.
Sadly, those problems are not restricted to a single continent or country. Today I read of a whole high school class in Eastern Germany that failed the final exams in their mother tongue! How utterly embarassing! I love doing crossword puzzles and lately I keep finding that more and more of the questions and definitions are wrong (a dolphin is a mammal, NOT a fish!! - Nor should it be spelled with an F, the name being derived from the Greek city of Delphi). It's apparently a global trend that people in 1st world countries neglect their education and get stupider and stupider. Our last German spelling reform was just a sign of the times, changing the spelling to the most primitive level you can imagine. When it comes to culture, using the smallest common factor is a lethal mistake.
^^ I agree completely. Cows are content. I think our society needs all the elitism it can get. Now that you mention it, I used to work with somebody who thought that.
^And many others. I do my best using relative scales to illustrate the mind-bending scales of creation. A small outdoor table of mine is a good starting point for mapping out the solar system. When I place the closest star to our home star on the other side of the city, there's always a "wow!". I know in my own experience I'm in the minority so far as conceiving of the larger structure we find ourselves in. I will always remember when, as a child, I first picked up a 'LIFE' book simply titled 'The Universe'. I opened it up to a poster of the solar system and - to my astonishment - discovered the big bright thing in the sky was way, WAY bigger than the big thing I was walking around on. That discovery started a chain of inquiry that has been continually evolving. I suspect a lot of us here share that spark of curiosity. However, a good number of people I interact with on a daily basis have hardly given it a second thought. Odd. We've all found ourselves in this thing we call The Universe. Yet, there have been times I've been ridiculed for not having more grounded interests.
All this poll shows is that a large percentage of people don't listen to the questions they are asked. That's a basic problem of streets surveys. You basically ambush people with a set of questions when they are occupied with a thousand other things. Stuff like "What is George W. Bush's first name?" or "How long does it take the Earth to travel around the sun?" always gets weird answers.
To be fair, if someone asked me this question, I would get it wrong. Most likely, I'd ignore the question and answer something fairly random. If I did think about it, I'd probably start wondering if it was 364.25 days or 366.25 days until it takes me a couple of minutes to figure out those are sidereal days, and the revolution is in fact 365.25 normal solar days. I always have those two mixed up. I know that one of the two (rotation around the axis, and the revolution about the sun) is not what first comes to mind, but I never remember which.
And of course the Earth takes approximatly 23hours and 56 mins to complete one full rotation on it's axis (aka a sidereal day) as apposed to the solar day which is 24hours.
To be fair, this is actually good advice in an industry that deals with people. It's one thing to know lots of words, it's another to assume everyone else does. When it comes to business communications, it's smarter to be simpler. This is a problem many bad trial lawyers have. The good ones speak simply, the bad ones speak complicatedly.