You really can't glean the information just by looking at it if you've literally never seen one before in your life. It's hard to Envision if you're just used to it, like I said I was a little slow to read it but I still know how I'm just not used to it so it's no longer instant . But I also can understand that if you've literally never seen one in your life and never had it mentioned to you you would really have no way to know what the difference between the big or the small hand was.

Now if you did sit and stare at it for long enough you could eventually figure it out as the hands moved but most people aren't going to sit there and stare at a clock for 10min to try and figure it out.

At the end of the day even mundane things can be a skill, and I do agree that there is a substantial lack of critical thinking as the generations go on it was a problem already in my generation much less these latest ones. All That No Child Left Behind and standardized testing crap really destroyed schools hard it went from critical thinking to just memorize the answer or skip the question if you don't know, asking questions became bad and unfortunately that's going to follow you into adulthood