I find it frightening. It shows how under-educated many people are these days. Which means our schools aren't really teaching anything important. Sure it's nice to know how to recycle cans, but that kind of knowledge doesn't really transfer to anything in the real world. They might not be exciting subjects, but people need to know how weather works (so they can protect themselves), how our government (and more importantly how our constitution) works (so they can vote intelligently), etc...
That's because schools these days teach answers to standardized tests. There's no more room for creative thinking, which would allow a student to analyze the facts available and fall back on his experience and knowledge and make an educated guess about what the right answer should be. No, no place for that in the classroom anymore. A student now simply memorizes by rote the information that will be on the standardized tests, because this alone seems to have become the standard for measuring a student's "success." If a piece of information isn't on the standardized test, the student is oblivious to it. The student may learn about the Earth's rotation causing day and night, and might learn some facts about the Sun, but, as we're apparently seeing, lacks the ability to think creatively enough to realize that the Sun itself has no day or night, or that the observation of day or night at one point on the Earth's surface isn't universal for
all points on the Earth's surface.
Sadly, I know many, many people - even in my own family - of many ages, but usually the younger generations, who are suffering in this way. Some have no concept at all of time zones. For others, they just have no idea whatsoever how the weather works - not even the most basic concepts. Geography seems to be a near universal zero for everyone in my family under 30, while I'm the sole exception. I have cousins who have studied Spanish, apparently, for seven years already, but even the simplest, most basic phrases are incomprehensible to them.
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