5 Mar 2012 - Children unaware of origins of food

Today I read an article on The Age website about Australian children's knowledge of the origins of food and other materials. It turns out that 75 per cent of year six students and over 40 per cent of year ten students believe that cotton is derived from animals. Also 27 per cent of year six students and 13 per cent of year ten students think that yoghurt comes from plants. The article presented these facts as a problem and stated that it was the agricultural industry's task to fix this problem. I admit that I was concerned that the next generation was lacking fundamental knowledge, but then I thought about why I was concerned and I realised it wasn't actually that this fact concerned me, it was the way the facts were presented in the article and the tone of the article that incited my concern.

When I actually thought about it, I couldn't remember how old I was when I learnt about the origins of yoghurt or cotton. The more I thought about, the more I couldn't decide whether these facts were really even a problem. Is 13 per cent of people in Australia not knowing about the origins of yoghurt by the age of about 16 really an issue? Some people are just not that interested in the origin of things, and I will say what everyone is thinking, not everyone is that bright! It is also fun to have a good laugh with your friends later in life when you realise that you didn't learn something in school, that everyone else learnt. An example is that I recently found out that a friend of mine didn't know that the term 'kilometres per hour' actually meant, how many kilometres you will travel in an hour, so didn't know how to guess how long it would take to get to a destination based on the approximate speed of the car, and the distance remaining to the destination. Me and another friend of mine had a great laugh when we learnt this about our mutual friend. I think this highlights that these figures are not really a problem because if everybody knows everything about the origins of food and other facts by the time they leave school, then people are going to be deprived of laughter and simply put, nobody wants to live in a world where you can't laugh at the lack of knowledge of others!

The article was on The Age website.