My grandmother used to say she hated learning history in school because it
was just a bunch of names and dates that meant nothing to her. Finding out
that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215 meant - what? - to a young girl
living on a farm in the early 1920s.

That is my biggest beef with the current education system (along with
teaching kids as one mass unit and worrying more about how specific test
scores come out than if the children are actually understanding and
appreciating what they have been taught) - that they are given information
without necessarily showing them how it connects to their current and
especially future lives.

Why should anyone care that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun,
or even that Earth orbits our star? The Sun seems to come up in the
east every day to get things going - that's all they need to know.

How urgent is it to folks on this forum that they know how to perform
surgery, or who won the World Series or World Cup? It matters a LOT
to more people than who was the first man on the Moon.

We know we live on a Pale Blue Dot in an utterly immense Cosmos, but
that fact doesn't connect with people who have to scrape by each day
just to stay alive. Knowing how big and wonderful the Universe really
is and our place in it is vitally important, but until society and our
education system does something to improve life and make these
things matter to folks, knowing about Mercury or whether Pluto is a
planet or not will remain the stuff of those uncool space geeks.

BTW - today is Madonna's birthday (born in 1958) and Babe Ruth died
on this day in 1948 at age 53. Darn few people you will find who don't
know who they are.