Is New Zealand like this?

www.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/6522766/...lias-cultural-cringe

I fear that our own population are becoming a bit the same.

emmm.. having just had to deal with aussie customs and freight agents, i think this is something accross all ages..the ones i have had to deal with ( and treading carefully so as not to offend ).. are THICK..
only had one person 'on to it' and she was a kiwi..[!]

'fraid so!

Selling at the local Farmers Market, I am asked a lot of questions by prospective customers - some of them quite frankly astounding in their ignorance. :confused:
I, in turn, amaze a lot of people with statements like;
- eggs are a seasonal product
- you only need flour, salt and water to make bread
- not all plants grow in the same soil
- and, not to forget; Blueberries do not grow year-round...

it's not that they are 'thick' - a lot of people are so far removed from the origins of what they put into their mouths, they have no clue what the single ingredients actually look like, or where they come from. Or if they need to be in there, for that matter[!]

The "brain drain" from NZ to OZ - raised the IQ of both countries...

My daughter, year 11 science class - the teacher was talking about cheese last week (yea!) - DD piped up about all kinds of cheese, and went on and on and then realised everyone in the class was staring at her. Then she got to the bit about mould growth flavouring cheeses, and the class gave a collective 'ewwwwwwwwww'. Teacher beaming at her, she saying 'my mum makes cheese...' Most people probably have never even tasted proper cheese in their lives, present company excepted, of course!

I don't think I have ever tried home made cheese, like cheese made in someones kitchen []

Come over for dinner one night! Tonight's quiche thing has home-made cheese - we all do it

Blueberry;413368 wrote: 'fraid so!

Selling at the local Farmers Market, I am asked a lot of questions by prospective customers - some of them quite frankly astounding in their ignorance. :confused:
I, in turn, amaze a lot of people with statements like;
- eggs are a seasonal product
- you only need flour, salt and water to make bread
- not all plants grow in the same soil
- and, not to forget; Blueberries do not grow year-round...

it's not that they are 'thick' - a lot of people are so far removed from the origins of what they put into their mouths, they have no clue what the single ingredients actually look like, or where they come from. Or if they need to be in there, for that matter[!]

I'm glad you find this at the Farmers market - we just thought it was the visiting Wellingtonians who had no idea about what grew when, how and where. "Do you make mango chutney?" is probably our most common question at the FM.

eelcat;413390 wrote: Come over for dinner one night! Tonight's quiche thing has home-made cheese - we all do it

Yum, give me half an hour

("In year 10, only 13 per cent identified yoghurt as a plant product") since when has milk been a plant? unless you count strawberry yogurt maybe??

mikethebike;413395 wrote: ("In year 10, only 13 per cent identified yoghurt as a plant product") since when has milk been a plant? unless you count strawberry yogurt maybe??

That "only" relates to the previous statement about year 6 students. So in Year 6 x% identified yoghurt as a plant product, but in year 10 only 13 percent did so.

I saw that article and immediately asked my Year 6, 10 year old daughter if she knew where cotton and yoghurt came from. Thank goodness she did but that is probably due to the fact that we live rurally so she is a bit closer to the food source.
Also we are a family of readers and though she now chooses and reads her own books I specifically remember when they were small having a read aloud book about big farm machinery and there was a cotton picking machine in there. They loved that book.

Just remembered Richard Scarry's childrens books "Busy Busy World" and "What Do People Do All Day". One of these describes the processing of cotton from picking to clothes.

Deliberate dumbing down of our children.

Theres a very good book about this by a lady called Charlotte Iserbyte (pronounced Iser-bee).

She was involved in educational politics for many many years in the states and thought (like the rest of us) that the school system failing our children was the result of bad decision making within educational politics until she had a major epipheny and realised there was an ongoing agenda to dumb down children via state schools and to "train" them as a subservient idiot workforce as opposed to "teaching them to think" and educating them.

This ladys book "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" has alot of parallels with NZ and AU schools.
Heard an interview with her a while back where she outlined her discovery that the US gov' had been buying up her books and destroying them. That prompted her to release it online in PDF format for "free" around a 7mb download if anyone was interested.
If you can find an original edition version of her book nowdays they usually go for $80 - $140USD, so the free download is pretty cool.

I was reading something else recently to do with curriculum for teaching mathematics in primary schools and it was such cotton-wool clad rubber-suit nonsense I was flabberghasted, unfortunately I don't have the link - will repost it if I remember the resource.
Basically it went along the tune of "mathematics is not black and white and there are no set solutions, results are correct on the basis of group consensus and may not always be consistant ... blah blah blah."

Basically in entireity it was groupthink politics, if the group say 2+2=5 then 5 is the answer. Bare in mind this was a primary teaching guide resource - we aren't talking university level quantum mechanic "rarified-air" mathematics or anything complex. :rolleyes:

igor;413448 wrote: Just remembered Richard Scarry's childrens books "Busy Busy World" and "What Do People Do All Day". One of these describes the processing of cotton from picking to clothes.

Yes, I asked my kids aged 11 and 14 about yoghurt and cotton. When I asked 11 yr old where yoghurt comes from she said "cows milk", she didn't know about cotton but 14 year old son did from same Richard Scarry book - yay!
I always loved his books and we did spend a lot of time reading from them.
Mind you my kids are crap at geography and knowing where countries are in the world (not sure how useful this is?) so we keep a map of the world stuck on bathroom wall which comes in really useful for us adults too as I am forever trying to remember where in the world somewhere is especially when they change the name of countries.