Hi Allan,

My experience with relatives with senility is that they seem to lock into a younger age. However, I'm not so sure that those educated in the early 1950s will have had such narrow vocabularies by the time they hit infant school; my experience of adults of the post war generation is that their basic factual and "general" knowledge (which begins to get established at an early age) is as good, and often better, than the base knowledge of many of today's children. i have my fathers chilhood books (he was born in the 40s) and they contain information that is far more advanced than "cat" and "apple" (social class wise my dad's father was killed in the war, he lived on a council estate and his mother worked - so no advantages there).

Either way I'm not disputing the basic idea, just that they have a strange idea of basic knowledge sets - if nothing else most pre-school kids would have had a good working knowledge of Noah's Ark - and what's always seen sticking out the top - giraffe heads!

Pete

God is our guide! from field, from wave, From plough, from anvil, and from loom; We come, our country's rights to save, And speak a tyrant faction's doom: We raise the watch-word liberty; We will, we will,we will be free!