Are they learning anything? Anything at all?

The scientific literacy of the average fanfic writer is beginning to appall me. For what seems the hundredth time I've just spotted a story where the protagonist learns that one of the characters lives in a hollow tree and assumes there must be "some sort of magic" involved to keep the tree alive.

Except that living hollow trees exist in the real world. Animals live in them. Actual trees only have a narrow band of living tissue between the bark and the inner wood of the tree, where the xylem and phloem (the circulatory paths of the plant) exist; so long as you don't cut through that all the way around, the tree will live. This was once basic education in elementary science; how plants grow. I have known this since grade school.

Yet alleged high school and college age children-- you know, the ones who rant and rave about saving the trees-- are completely ignorant of how trees grow.

Forget grammar and sentence structure: basic vocabulary eludes many of them. If I had a dime for every time I have seen "leered" used in place of "glared...."