How do I know what my DC don't know?! what constitutes general knowledge?!?

[orchidsonabudget]

What are the basics of "general knowledge"?!

As an example
We don't really follow football at all in our house.
I hear the stuff and vaguely pay attention and I occasionally watch england in a major tournament. I few up watching a Question of Sport in a world before streaming/gaming etc where we all watched stuff we perhaps wouldn't choose because we only had 1 telly etc. This added hugely to my general knowledge.
My 12 y/o DS just said something along the lines of "Arsenal are winning the World Cup" and we realised he doesn't really get it.
What else doesn't he know? And what will he need to know?

Grateful to hear your thoughts?

Are you ok to wait ten mins whilst I tap into his head and run a full report for you..?

I think the best thing we can do is teach them to use a Search Engine so that if they don't know something they can find the answer.

No one can know absolutely everything!

LOL that would be great!
I don't know what I am asking really. Just more I was a bit surprised that he hadn't any clue about the football thing

We buy newspapers and since they were able to read, one of my DC will select and read me an article whilst I prepare dinner. This gives them a general knowledge about the world, the countries and their capital , and open the discussion about facts, politics, religions, climate, and so on.
In the car, I have a news radio and we talk about what we listen.
We also have a nice DK books collection, of art, engineering , history , science, ....
I never put age restrictions on books and always preferred for them to read adult books aver teenage crap. I am lucky that French classics are far more entertaining than British classics, with murders, adultery, and so on !!

I’m always astonished that football is regarded as general knowledge. To me it seems very niche relative to knowledge of the world around us - current affairs, basic history and geography, etc.

This

I have to admit I have zero knowledge of football. I’ve been very lucky to meet a husband who has no interest in it either. So it really hasn’t impacted my life.

I don't have much knowledge - I know a few of the teams (from listening to the final score and question of sport) and know that there are leagues for country and then the main countries play in the world cup - my DS clearly doesn't know this much!!!

You can watch sport with him if he's interested. I have one DS who is sporty and sport mad and one who doesn't give a shit but he has some basic knowledge from hearing it being talked about. To me general knowledge is knowing about the world- where countries are, different religions and faiths, knowing about politics and the political system. And knowing stuff in science and history that is beyond their curriculum.

Something like the Week Junior magazine?

We are in the US. We listen to NPR a lot especially in the car. We talk about politics with our kids all the time. I'm also a historian by profession so they have some knowledge of modern history. I'm not a historian of the US and so I've made an effort to learn about it so I can discuss it with them. They know some basic science/medicine from DH. DH has zero interest in sport but I'll watch sport with them and talk to them about it. We travel with them and we like teaching them about where they are going and so on. We also speak our mother tongue at home so they've learned an additional language that way.

I get the week junior for mine and we occasionally watch news round - they're a bit younger than your ds at 11 and 8.

Listen to the new in the car, discuss current events and local events/news.

Reading. Anything and everything. Use the library for all its worth. Buy newspapers and magazines and leave them lying about. Talk to them and comment on things you or they see or hear on the radio or the TV, including the news as well as any commentary. Talk about songs and the artists and why you do or don't like them, what they're about, the type of music, their inspiration. Use and explain new and out of date cultural references.

At university my friend discovered that raisins are dried grapes. She rang her sister, who didn't know either. They both rang their mum, who was surprised they didn't know!

When my son was, I think 8, we were staying at a friend’s house and I told him, “Your towel’s on the landing”. He didn’t know what a landing was (we live in a flat).

I think having the news on TV regularly helps. As do age appropriate Museum visits.

A pp mentioned teaching them how to use a search engine which is also good but you would need to help them distinguish reliable sources from the rubbish.

A lot of general knowledge is picked up in school subjects such as history and geography so discussing what they have learnt during the day over a meal is a good idea as you can sometimes add a bit to what they are learning.

When they get to the age when they don't really want to talk that much I used to ask my kids to tell me one new thing they had learnt that day then they could disappear.

Tables are now turned and DS2 (15) still regularly asks me 'do you want to know a cool fact' and comes up with some random knowledge.

We watch a lot of quiz shows and always have done as DC have grown up, it's amazing what you can learn from quizzes themselves. They're 19 and 15 now and we still regularly have family time where we'll watch University Challenge and Only Connect or some other quizzes that we record and DC both get a good few answers watching them now.

It's also surprising what you can learn from random TV shows. Stuff like The Simpsons has been responsible for us being able to answer a good few questions in harder quizzes at times.

I was always the sort of child to read encyclopaedias for fun, and DC2 in particular has taken after me in that way. And anytime they ask a question I don't know or only know part of the answer to, we just look it up online, often just on Wikipedia. We aren't writing academic papers, just wanting general knowledge and Wiki is usually the best for the things we want to look up.

Nobody's knowledge is perfect, but there's always an opportunity to learn.

Do you have books in your house? Encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesaurus, books on art, music, history, culture, travel, science etc ? I would suggest the radio, but the BBC output is so poor now, I hesitate, however if you are coming from a standing start it's better than nothing. A knowledge of sport does not constitute general knowledge.

'General knowledge' is hugely influenced by your age, your culture, your schooling, your family, and friends. By culture, I mean that in the widest sense and include all sorts of things - such as the fact that your ds, for example, is growing up in a house that doesn't really follow football, whereas a peer at school might be growing up in a family that does. Can, of course, substitute 'football' with anything.

By 10 though, I would expect 'general knowledge' to include 'things that are going on and being reported on in the news / talked about when you meet other people'.

Football isn't general knowledge!
DH and I do lots of quizzes and know nothing at all about football (men or women's)

I would recommend First News too.

I tend to think of general knowledge as the categories in trivial pursuit, so:

Geography - he should be able to identify continents, countries, oceans, rivers, mountains etc.
History - be aware of WW1 & WW2 & various other wars/battles. Royalty, politics in the UK
Sport - what sports there are, the names of competitions & trophies, famous sportspeople
Science & nature - parts of the human body, different land and sea animals
Entertainment - movies & tv shows, celebs
Art & literature - can recognise famous paintings & their artists, Shakespeare, theatre

I like the idea of getting him to read a newspaper article and discuss it.

Of course it is. General knowledge covers all sorts of topics. Knowing the difference between the FIFA world cup and other football competitions is no different to knowing which 4 tennis tournaments count as Grand Slam tournaments, or knowing which countries make up the Arabian Peninsula, or knowing the currency of Japan. It's all general knowledge.

Agree with @DontMakeMeShushYou .
Of course football makes up one part of General knowledge. That is the point - it is 'general', not specifically about one narrow group of subjects.

If might not be your specialist subject, but a recent World Cup in any sport that has been on the news in whatever form you get your daily news, would be considered something that 'most' people would have some knowledge of - even if you are sitting there thinking, I can't answer that question so I wished I'd paid attention when they were reporting it on the news last week.

This is why it is partly cultural. If I lived in the States, then I'd expect most people to have heard of top Basketball, Baseball and American Football Teams, whereas if I live in England, I wouldn't necessarily think that were 'general' knowledge. But whilst the Lionesses are doing well in the World Cup and while the England Cricket Team have been in such an enthralling Test Series recently, I'd expect that to be considered 'general knowledge' at the moment. Same as you'd be able to name 3 TV Soap Operas, even if you don't watch soaps, and so forth. It is just "stuff" you have sloshing about in your brain.

I know a lot of general knowledge because I read a lot - books, articles, newspapers etc. and I do crosswords. I don't know much about football tho. Get him a book or show him some articles

We watch a lot of quiz shows and always have done as DC have grown up, it's amazing what you can learn from quizzes themselves.

This! We'd watch the news, plus HIGNIFY, University Challenge etc as children.

University Challenge is piss easy as an adult if you know the formula.

And for books, we had Horrible Histories, Horrible Science.

Whenever we bought a broadsheet weekend paper, the sport section would go straight on the fire, but we'd pick things up from the TV