Daisy Christodoulou, via Will Fitzhugh:

In 2007, I trained as a teacher and started teaching English in a secondary school in Southeast London that enrolls stu- dents between the ages of 11 and 18. One of the first things that struck me when I was teaching was that my pupils seemed to know so little. Even the bright and hard-working pupils seemed to me to have big gaps in their knowledge.

Before I became a teacher, I’d read newspaper articles about pupils lacking knowledge, but I had always assumed these reports had been exaggerated by the media. I wondered if my experiences were unusual, but the experiences of colleagues at other schools seemed similar to mine. Pupils who didn’t know where milk came from, who didn’t know the name of the British prime minister, who could barely name any foreign countries, and who had no idea of when important world-changing technologies had been invented.

I started researching the issue, and I found that my experiences weren’t atypical. I also found that many American teachers had the same experiences. For example, there’s a study showing that two-thirds of Americans can’t name the three branches of the United States government.1 In the United Kingdom, there’s a study showing that a third of pupils think the House of Lords is elected.