Scary

Anyway, The question was something like "This class G2 star is the closest stellar object to earth."
All 3 contestants got it wrong. 2 said Alpha Centauri (rigil kent) and one said Proxima Centauri.

Many people think of "star" as "some star other than the sun." Not true in the dictionary sense, but still...

when I said something in conversation about the sun being a star. It was then that I realized our education system was going to hell. I learned that little fact when I was in grade school.

..on that show can name the wife of a 3rd cousin to some obscure duke in the 13th century.
When they ask those kind of things I sit in my chair looking a lot like a deer caught in the headlights.

Well, I would.

You don't know that the fucking sun is a star???? Just stupid.


Its just elementary science that everyone should know.


And on Jeopardy... like doing a cross word puzzle....you should expect such a semi-trick question.

But I alway laugh when the category is "Opera". These smarties are clueless!

...not that surprised. What really shocks me is sometimes (when watching a movie), I'll see the full moon rise at midnight or some other impossible time and think..O'Boy...

I love in "Prometheus" someone says "We're a billion miles from Earth"..... which puts them somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn.

...told me the sun orbited around the earth. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Since I was a big fan of astronomy I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was wrong, even though she insisted that I was wrong and she was right. That lead me to conclude that she might be wrong about all that god stuff too. A few years later I was able to shrug off the whole god myth once and for all.

Otherwise, the OP is in danger of coming across as a smear based on conjecture - rather than evidence.

Your last paragraph, while concerning, does nothing to support the assertion/conclusion of the 2nd-to-last paragraph.

The problem is it takes a snapshot and people immediately compare it with what they assume was the case years ago. It's invariably worse now than before. What we remember from years before isn't a random sample--those who read such surveys and write such stories are typically educated, and remember hanging out with educated people.

The debunking was to look at prior surveys that asked the same or equivalent questions. In other words, compare not data against an assumed past but against the real past. Usually the results are better now than before, but that's not much of a story. Teachers may care, but nobody else: Neither politicians nor advocates get any advantage from saying, "We're doing better but have a long ways to go." It's nuanced. It's better just to say, "A quarter of our kids ___________". Those educated get no ego boost from knowing that they're less special than they used to be, and those they look down are decreasing in number.

Yes, the numbers are better for most developed countries than for the US. But still, a survey last year had people not knowing what the Earth's orbital period was. "Year." The problem was vocabulary, of course, but the article I read billed it as not understanding the definition of "year"--not the definition of "orbital period."

There are many ways to create false impressions in the minds of readers.

Given that this was published in "Addicting Info" suggests it's a left-leaning story. The verbiage in the article is another giveaway.

And when you add in the fact that we do in fact see many and varied attempts to inject creationism and the Bible into school curriculums, the figures become more believable.

I do not know of any prior studies that asked these same exact questions, nor did the article refer to any.

Could be a case of "finding information that confirms our pre-conceived notions." But when one considers the flood of information now available on the internet, it becomes easier to go with items that conform to our beliefs.

And of course Creationism has nothing to say on what orbits what (because when they wrote it, they didn't know anything orbited anything)

If they had asked which came first, the sun or the Earth.... then creationism comes into play.

This time of year, where I live, we say that the Sun rises about 6 AM and sets about 8 PM. That's idiomatic English. We normally speak as if the Sun moved about a stationary Earth. Only when challenged would we explain that what's really happening is that the Earth is spinning on its axis, etc. In debate we are Copernicans, but in ordinary speech we are Ptolemaics. Those with no experience in science probably believe that what they usually say must be true.