Steve I agree with you about our education system, I have a neighbor who has a 3rd grade girl-who can't read! She should not be in the 3rd grade, but they pass her, and 1000's of others, on so they don't have the problem.
I don't want to digress too much...
I have a problem with astronomy and some of its calculations and predictions that I find hard to explain, but will try. I will first assume there was a "big bang" so everything should be equally dispersed throughout the universe, since it was flung out at, as they say, 99.9% of the speed of light. There should be a very large empty sphere of space somewhere and all other matter in sort of a thin (relatively) shell around this space.
The big bang afterglow may be the border of this inner sphere of emptiness, yet no one has proposed this I don't think. IT could be so large as to appear it's surrounding us much as the sky appears to stretch overhead. I would expect the afterglow to still be traveling at, or very close to 99.9% of light speed so the evidence we observe is not as distant but should, could, be much farther away.
If, in fact, they do see the afterglow I also would not expect to see any organized galaxies anywhere near it since it is theoretically a few millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second after the bang occurred.
String theory could explain a lot of this but has some perpelxing parts which I find hard to fathom, such as 10 dimensions instead of the four, electro magnetic, weak force, strong force, and gravity.
http://zidbits.com/2011/03/a-laymans-explanation-for-string-theory/
There are other astro-physics problems I have but can't put into words. One has to do with the distances of some observable objects that are more than 5 billion light years distant. If Earth is 4 billion years old, why do we see so many other objects at that distance?