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?

Different people have different knowledge areas.

I know next to nothing about Sport, Celebrities & Music, so in pub quizzes I am generally hopeless. Except that I have an eclectic collection of random knowledge about Literature, History, Geography, Cooking, Science, so I often get questions the rest of the team don't know.

My DH on the other hand is very good on aeroplanes, and various science subjects, but his knowledge of history and Eng Lit are woeful.

DD knows nothing about anything much except animals.

Sporcle is a great quiz website for wasting hours and hours of your life learning lots of interesting stuff. I can name every country in the world, almost every capital in the world, and tell you the lyrics for a wide selection of Disney songs

Horrible Histories is great for historical knowledge.

Catchphrase is also good for learning different turns of phrase.

We used to do "odd one out" — DM or DF would give us a list of three or four names/places/people and you had to say which was the odd one out and why. Can be made easier or harder (and if there's more than one correct answer you can argue over it ).

Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Stena, Qantas

Helsinki, Tallinn, Oslo, Stockholm

Lassie, Snowy, Timmy, Mog

Mark Rober and Physics Girl on YouTubeis great for science stuff.

I've just discovered my 18yo doesn't know idioms. So I've found a youtube clip explaining the 100 top ones.

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

@thecatsthecats Can you enlighten me as to what the formula is?! I definitely do not know the formula, and clearly neither do some of the contestants.

When my son was younger, admittedly younger than yours OP, he loved the "Weird But True" books by National Geographic. When encouraging him to read more, we'd read a page each and discuss/comment on each fact.

We have always watched "edutainment" so educational but entertaining stuff on youtube as a family. Off the top of my head Tom Scott (British, the world around us) Smarter Every day (science), Crash Course (unbelievable amount of topics) Extra Credits, Kurzgesagt and our absolute favourite CGP Grey who I stumbled across when looking how to explain why we are both Great Britain and the UK plus the whole Commonwealth Realm and British Overseas Territories. I wish youtube had been around when I was a child.

We also watch things like The Chase or Who Wants to be a Millionaire and we pause so that the children have time to think and answer even if it is just eliminating an answer. We also watch news programs too.

However I will link a fantastic video by Bill Wurtz which is probably on your son's radar anyway, viewed 160 million times about the world.

I'd forgotten about those but we watch those too. Very sadly Diana, aka Physics girl is horrifically ill with long covid as in hospitalised it is so bad. Just awful.

I was really surprised that i had to explain how Number PLates on cars work to my 15 year old son, i.e. that the fist 2 letters denote the area of the country the cars from, the number are the year of registration and how they work and the last 3 are just random, I guess if you've never told your kids, how would they ever know?

Also when my boys were young teens i realised they didn't know the, "30 days hath September, April, June and November..." rhyme. I taught them stuff like this in the car on journeys when they were a captive audience.

My DC listen to podcasts on their Yoto players and read The Week Junior magazine. They seem reasonably informed for primary aged children.

Quiz shows and books, newspaper with general knowledge crossword, listening to radio 4, talking with a variety of people, days out to interesting places, having the tv on one of the main channels…

People on here can get really snobby about what people "should" know, but ultimately a lot depends on your interests. I like geography and history and know a bit about athletics/swimming but am rubbish on things like popular culture and films because eg I don't watch box sets. And I don't know much about other sports.

My son was always very good at spelling place names because of football teams. You can learn things in unexpected ways.

Reading encyclopedias is a good way to learn stuff but I expect it's all online now.

Guinness Book of records is good as well.

General reading and watching the news.

I was really surprised that i had to explain how Number PLates on cars work to my 15 year old son, i.e. that the fist 2 letters denote the area of the country the cars from, the number are the year of registration and how they work and the last 3 are just random, I guess if you've never told your kids, how would they ever know

Missing the point of the thread but number plates in the UK seem really random, whereas eg in Germany you can tell where a car is from (or at least where it is registered - unlike in the UK you have to reregister your car if you move house to a new area, eg from Cologne to Berlin).

One of our cars was registered in Devon but starts CF - which I would have thought was Cardiff! But it isn't.

What one person might consider to be "obvious" general knowledge isn't the same as another person's. Think of it a bit like with Pointless or Family Fortunes - okay maybe 60 people out of a hundred might be able to name a half dozen characters from Eastenders, maybe 90 people could name three football teams who play in the premiership, maybe only 1 or 2 people could name the longest river in Zimbabwe. But to each of those people, they would probably shrug and say yes that's obvious general knowledge that the people who can't are boggled by.

The trick is to know the answer to the question

Basic geography including a bit of an overview of the cultures of different countries. I’m often so surprised at how little my kids know about the world.

‘General knowledge’ is just knowledge that may generally be known as opposed to specialised knowledge, but it’s not ‘everyone’s knowledge’

Otherwise there would be no point to general knowledge questions in game shows and quizes as everyone would always know the answer

The key thing is to not ridicule someone for not knowing something, such as the the opener video a few years ago - making fun of a teenager not knowing how to use a tin opener but continuing to try. The idiots in the video were behind the camera

In your Arsenal / World Cup example, just give the explanation - Arsenal is a team in the UK whereas the World Cup is an international event.

It could be worth adding that he’s not alone in thinking of national & world - if you look up World Series baseball
(and there is also a true world championship in which the US don’t win)

Watching Newsround every day only takes 10 mins and includes popular culture items as well as actual news. My ds is pretty well informed as he hears stuff at home and has friends who are interested in current affairs and soaks it up. Dd has had the same exposure at home but hasn't retained info in the same way. However she is much better at practical stuff.

Just placemarking for later.

I thought my dc had good general knowledge but I discovered they didn't.
They didn't know about primary and secondary colours and you mix yellow and blue to get green and so on
They couldn't identify Italy on a map. I assumed everyone knew it was shaped like a boot.
I got them an art palette and a globe. Got them on some map apps so they could identify countries.

I think general knowledge is different these days, like school learning. In for example, history or geography there is more emphasis on how or why. When can be easily googled. However, ds (12) follows Jack loves geography on YouTube and now can identify all the countries of the world and their flags.

I could never get mine to read the Week Junior or newspapers (I really tried!). However I did set the homescreen of our PC to Newsround so every time they used it they saw it (this was 10 years or so ago, before they all had tablets and laptops) and that definitely helped. We do watch quizzes etc.

Ultimately it is down to your interests. I am one of those people who reads voraciously, books, MN, newspapers, other online sources and therefore my general knowledge is a bit “jack of all trades master of none”, we do a pub quiz every week and my specialist subject is “random obscure facts that no one else knows”. But I am absolutely useless at films and TV as I read all the time instead of watching. DH is far better at these and far worse at random facts. One teen DC is brilliant on history, geography, world politics, current affairs but knows virtually nothing about fiction, the other is very vague on all the factual stuff but brilliant on certain genres of film, TV, books and other pop culture because that’s the world she inhabits.