What is the point of filling curriculums with the latest in nonsensical new-age methodology and a raft of programs that are time-consuming but utterly ineffective when our children don’t even know the basics? It seems that we are allowing our kids to become selfish and insular, far more concerned about themselves than the world around them. It is essential that our children become more aware of the world around them.
More than a third of 16 to 23-year-olds (36%) do not know bacon comes from pigs and four in 10 (40%) failed to link milk with an image of a dairy cow, with 7% linking it to wheat, the poll of 2,000 people for charity Leaf (Linking Environment and Farming) found.
Some 41% correctly linked butter to a dairy cow, with 8% linking it to beef cattle, while 67% were able to link eggs to an image of a hen but 11% thought they came from wheat or maize.
A total of 6% of those questioned knew that salad dressing could come from rapeseed oil, compared with the national average among all age groups of 24%.
Although four in 10 young adults (43%) considered themselves knowledgeable about where their food comes from, the results revealed a “shocking” lack of knowledge about how the most basic food is produced, the charity said.
Leaf chief executive Caroline Drummond said: “We often hear reports that our food knowledge may be declining but this new research shows how bad the situation is becoming.
“Despite what they think, young adults are clearly becoming removed from where their food comes from.
“Three in 10 adults born in the 1990s haven’t visited a farm in more than 10 years, if at all, which is a real shame as our farmers not only play an important role in food production but are passionate about engaging and reconnecting consumers too.”
The charity, which is organising an Open Farm Sunday event this weekend, also found almost two-thirds of young adults (64%) did not know that new potatoes would be available from British farms in June, and one in 10 (10%) thought they took less than a month to grow.
OnePoll surveyed 2,000 C adults online between May 11 and 14.
Tags: bacon, Caroline Drummond, Charity, Children, dairy cow, Education, Education Matters, kids, Leaf, life, Linking Environment and Farming, Milk, News, Onepoll, Open Farm Sunday, Survey, UK
Topical Teaching 
June 17, 2012 at 1:01 pm |
One needn’t think it’s any better in urban communities in Australia. The more we rely on cyber technology, the more we become estranged from the real world. Besides the 3 R’s primary school children ought to learn how to look after small animals, fowls, maybe, how to grow plants for food and how to prepare and cook it. They should be able to learn how to make things, draw things, paint and sketch. There should be more time spent on singing and dancing and physical games. I regret that schools are becoming such cheerless places with the atmosphere of a desert.
As long as we have politicians and educational administrators that think that children grow in factories (so called schools) the rot will continue. If we could get our bureaucrats and politicians to understand that children grow and learn better at the pace of a garden, than at the pace of an assembly line, in the environment of a garden, rather than the environment of a factory, we could save millions in special education programs. Yes you read correctly. The need for special education programs is largely generated in schools where the main business is testing, measuring and sorting instead of feeding, leading and growing. One thinks of the foolish farmer who spent so much of his time weighing his pigs that he forgot to feed them. In the end they all got sick and died.