One of my coworkers was homeschooled and also in an unnamed church school (don’t want to piss off any dopers who may share the particular sect).
Almost every day I am monkey-slapped with a doozy of a gap in his education. The big ones that I’ll never forget were…
He believed that all nuclear weapons had been disarmed, except for a single bomb owned by the US. He was dumbfounded when I told him that not only do we have thousands, but the nuclear club also includes England, France, India, China, Pakistan, etc.
He had never heard of alcohol Prohibition in America. When told that there was a constitutional amendment that prohibited alcohol, and later re-amended, he said “You can’t revise the Constitution can you? That’s illegal!”
As much as public education has it’s problems, trusting homeschool parents to make the right choices is a dangerous slippery slope.
My coworker just yesterday was telling me about all the stuff her brother has been finding out on the Internet. Like about alien abductions, how the IRS isn’t really part of the government, how he bought these $10 and $20 US coins, etc. About viruses and all those weight loss pills- you get the point. Finally, I realize that she believes this crap too. So I gently said “You know, about 90% of what you read on the Internet is untrue and scams absolutely abound. You gotta be careful who you’re sending money too and what you believe.”
She looks me straight in the eye and says “Are you serious?”
And that, my friends, is the target audience for the breast enlargement pills, the get-rich-quick schemes, and the Nigerian money laundering fraud. People really ARE that clueless.
At the pharmacy the other day, I had to sign some sheet of paper regarding privacy protection. While doing so, I mentioned the clause of the Patriot Act that enables the feds to look at people’s library records, and got into a discussion of censorship with the pharmacist. I concluded by saying, “Just like Big Brother, huh?” She responded, “Yeah, that show really gets in people’s business!”
Eek–another literary allusion slips out of the public’s consciousness…
Growing up, my brother and I, from time to time, would play the joke on my sister where you put a hand, palm down on someone’s head and bring the fingers together repeatedly, then ask the unsuspecting “victim”, “Do you know what this is?”. Answer–“It is a brain sucker–and its starving!”
My sister never seemed to get very upset by this joke, but it is not exactly the most insulting joke ever so we never thought much of it… She told us about 2 years ago, at the age of 21, that she had just figured out that the joke meant she didn’t have a brain to be sucked.
I know it is a kid’s joke, but my family still gets a kick out of it when someone brings it up.
And I’m sure there were many people cowering in terror at the threat of [dihydrogen monoxide.
Someone else mentioned the same scenario, but a college friend sent a roommate out to get lettuce… he came back with a head of cabbage, and seriously didn’t think anything of not knowing the difference.
A few years ago, I was sitting on the porch of my trailer, eating a mango, when the guy I was renting from came up and asked what it was. “A mango.” “A what?” I just sliced off a piece and handed it to him. “Hmm, that’s not bad,” he said, “what’s it called again?” This is in a town with a large seasonal Mexican population; the grocery stores sell piles of mangos in summer.
When moving to New Mexico, I did get the “can you take your cats? Do you have a passport?” questions.
I was working at a pet store, and training a new employee (about 30ish) on cleaning the aquariums. She had no concept of how or why a siphon worked.
I just read today that one of the Democratic presidential candidates has scrapped a planned series of ads criticizing Bush’s economic policies by comparing Bush to Herbert Hoover. Apparently, focus groups found that the ads weren’t working because a substantial number of viewers didn’t know who Hoover was or associate him with the Great Depression.
I believe the New York Times made a similar error when space rockets were first being mooted, but they printed a retraction and an apology on the occasion of the first Moon landing.
On a related note, I had a primary school teacher who explained that Moon astronauts wore heavy boots because there was no gravity on the Moon. And on a less related note, my primary school headmaster once explained how all the different colours in the rainbow were made up of a combination of red, blue and green light. (A slight and pardonable misunderstanding of how primary colours work.)
I had to bite my tongue when a colleague expressed surprise that the moon glowed because it reflected sunlight. She thought it shone in the same way the sun did.
I just managed to stop myself from commenting on NASA’s revolutionary factor six trillion sun-block, issued to Neil, Buzz and the others.
Just thought of another one–in a religion class I was taking, we were discussing various rites of passage and someone referred to puberty as “the time when women become able to have babies”. A guy in the class piped up “They can have babies when they’re that young?”
Turned out he had NO CLUE that the onset of menstruation meant that a woman could become pregnant–he was completely shocked.