> learning it in school

In all seriousness everybody still probably needs to learn it in school, because the scientific literature is entirely in metric. Even papers authored by Americans and published by, e.g., the American Chemical Society, all use µg/mg/g/kg and µm/mm/cm/m for their measurements. If you don't have an intuitive understanding of those measurements, you can run into visualization problems.

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isatis 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The funny part is that in elementary school here in the mid to late 90s, growing up in a rural area, metric was only touched upon for a day at most and until high school chemistry and physics classes, I very rarely had to deal with metric. Which sucked! My math classes kept to U.S. customary system / imperial units for example.

(It wasn't even told to me that it was the default for most of the world. It was disappointing to learn later how much resistance to metric there was in the U.S.)

	▲	spogbiper 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		weird. i did elementary in the midwest during the 1980s and we spent equal time on metric and imperial, in fact i think it was some kind of requirement that both were given equal attention

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runjake 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It turns out they have been teaching metric in (US) schools, through the grades, not just for an hour or whatever, again. Why? I don't know, but I approve.

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hamdingers 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Everyone educated since the 80s in the US has learned the metric system in school, this is a non-issue.

Moving the needle on what units people use conversationally is what's hard.