As someone who spends a great deal of life trying to educate people, I am always interested in how much they know before I encounter them. The latest news is not good.

According to an item from the Reuters news service, 75% of Americans can successfully identify two of Snow White&39;s Seven Dwarfs but only 25% can name two of our current Supreme Court Justices.

More people can identify Harry Potter than Tony Blair. 60% of people know that Homer Simpson&39;s son&39;s name is Bart, but only 20% could name The Iliad or The Oddessy as having been written by the Greek poet Homer.

60% of people know that Superman came from the fictional planet Krypton, but only 37% knew that Mercury was the planet closest to the sun on our solar system.

It got worse!

If that is the case, I wonder how much any of us can teach them. It seems to me that we are looking at a huge chasm and our failure to bridge it may not be all our fault. At the minimum we need a people who want to learn.

Still, the good news is that the real estate industry and the mortgage industry have many ethical experts who want to share their knowledge with their clients. But before they get in that position, consumers ought to make a modest investment in education on their own. There is a lot of terrific, interesting, valuable information out there about the credit, homebuying, and home financing processes. A lot of it is at credit.com.