You know Stewart, when I was a child I read a number of Enid Blyton books (story books!) and saw in the introduction to one of them that they were of educational value in that they mentioned such things as tadpoles turning into frogs. I sniffed at the idea, and went on sniffing for many years. I now realise that I did her (and a lot of her writers) an injustice.  Things that in our (rather rural and academic) family we took for granted, a lot of people never have heard of. When I became a parent we taught our children to read long before they went to school, and the reading matter we chose had a heavy educational bias. This we took for granted, and so did they, poor things! It was only later that we realised that knowledge and attitudes that none of us even had noticed, were not typical.

Nowadays I am becoming increasingly horrified at the sheer volume, never mind quality, of what we regarded as basic general knowledge, might as well be mathematical treatises in Linear A, for all that perfectly normal children understand or care about them. And guess who treaches them for the most part? Where are we to get teachers who have seen a nut case retrieve eggs from under a hen?

Better worry fast, while there still is something to worry about!