Ignorance of the Uneducated Children

The truly sad thing about Angela's Ashes, is actually the unavailability of a proper education for the boys. Even though they are young, a pre-school of some sort, a kindergarten or anything really would help. Their parents are surely no help. The dad is a drunk who really cares but unfortunately spends half his time in bars wasting away his earnings. And the mom is the one who's always on her feet trying get things together, trying to feed her kids, trying to get her husband to pull it together. Neither parents has the time or ability to present good morals and values or the opportunities for their children to be educated. Many examples of this are seen in the story:
Example 1: Malachy asked what a goat was, along with a cow, and other farm animals while they were walking by a farm. The father (Malachy also) got frustrated at finding a way to answer questions. It's like teaching someone to learn a language when they're not an infant or have another language to base it on. Like how would anyone explain the word: To? It's a little more difficult.
Example 2: Malachy and the boys, Frank included were surprised when eating a banana because they had never had one before. They even started eating the peel until someone embarrassingly enough told them not to.
Example 3: One of the boys woke up in the middle of the night having to use the bathroom and the father said to use the chamber pot. However, the child did not know what that was. Not very many people do in general- it's not that unusual, but at the time this book was written it wasn't a rare thing to find in people's homes.

From these examples, we see that simple things that we all know and take for granted are not known and have just been introduced to these boys. This is the most saddest part of the book- the lack of education.