Where has our basic general knowledge gone?

Admittedly, many children living in inner cities have never seen a cow, but there does seem to be rather a lack of ordinary everyday education in some areas.

Thinking that cheese comes from plants, tomatoes are grown underground and that fish fingers are made from chicken are other theories voiced, together with disbelief that eggs come from hens or bacon from pigs.

I’m not blaming schools here as surely basic knowledge should come from formative years with parents.

It’s a fact that many preschool children have never had a book read to them.

What a shame, when the bedtime story time is so special with little ones, eyes as big as saucers listen to tales of tigers coming to tea, very hungry caterpillars or going on bear hunts.

Woe betide you if you try to hurry it up and miss a bit out. You soon got told off!

But in an age where some children start school without having basic skills like toilet training or the ability to hold a pencil it’s not surprising that other kinds of knowledge should fall by the wayside.

Sometimes I am amazed at the lack of basic general knowledge at any age.

It’s easy to think that you might know more when you are a pensioner because you’ve lived longer, but even my age group can be clueless.

A survey by Jury’s Inn found that only 15 per cent of British people had any idea where Sheffield was on the map of England.

A total of 83 per cent could identify Birmingham and 76 per cent Liverpool, but with many people who could identify more landmarks abroad than at home.

That’s foreign travel broadening the mind!

People laughed at some of the faux pas of the late media star Jade Goody when she uttered beliefs that wasn’t East Anglia abroad?

Or that Rio de Janeiro was a footballer and Saddam Hussein a boxer, but she did have the excuse of little schooling and dysfunctional parenting.

As she said she had been made an ‘escape goat!’

She took it all in good part and actually managed to amass a fortune of eight million to leave to her sons when she died at a very young age of cervical cancer.

However, it seems that three out of every four adult Brits have no knowledge of Waterloo other than the fact that’s its either an Abba song or a railway station.

Few people can tell you what happened on important dates in history.

On a recent television quiz show a contestant had no idea what had happened in France between 1789 and the late 1790s.

And it is frightening how many adults don’t know when World War 2 started, let alone World War 1, or how long they lasted.

A quarter of all adults cannot identify garden plants, trees or birds and a frightening number have hardly ever read a book.

How many people of my age remember the little jingle they learnt at school about the Battle of Hastings?]

“William the Conqueror 1066, said to his captains, I mean to affix

England to Normandy. Go out and borrow

Some bows and some arrows, we’re starting tomorrow!”

There is more, ending with William’s death in 1087, and I’ve never forgotten it, even when I can’t always remember what I had for breakfast.

I’m not sure that children learn things parrot fashion anymore, but it certainly worked for me!

As for more practical skills, there has been a recent re-print of the ’Good Housekeeping’s Guide for young people’, targeting the 18-24-year olds.

A YouGov survey says that those of that age group, and most often these days still living at home with their parents, have no knowledge of basic household skills like washing dishes at the sink, changing fuses or light bulbs, ironing, how to clean toilets, sew on a button or assemble flat pack furniture.

A recent Love Island contestant said that he usually wore his underpants for at least three or four days, then threw them away as he hadn’t yet learnt how to work his washing machine.

However, I must laugh at the results of these surveys.

When I was a child it was rare that my father or any of his contemporaries ever did much in the way of household tasks.

My mother did everything including gardening, shopping, cooking, decorating and childcare.

It wasn’t that he was a thoughtless or lazy man, it was just the way it was done then. Men went out to work and women did everything in the home.

I can’t remember either that many of us getting married in the 1960s or 1970s were very conversant with how to run a house.

Somehow, we muddled through and yet we often produced sons who became ‘New Men’ and know how to do everything.Like my son who cooked a superb Christmas dinner, and I can’t remember ever buying him the ‘Good Housekeeping Guide’!

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