My interpretation: if you're 40 or older then (within some other constraints like where you live, etc.) your education was likely colored by cold war propaganda

My interpretation: if you're 40 or older then (within some other constraints like where you live, etc.) your education was likely colored by cold war propaganda which still somewhat weakly insisted on dividing the world into 3 nearly exclusive spheres of influence (American, Russian, and Non-Aligned aka 1st, 2nd, 3rd), and that may have shown up in your education even though the concept was already pretty much already obsolete in the 80s. I'm around that age, and Canadian, and I think it was at least brought up as the 'true' meaning of third world in my social studies classes, but it wasn't how people used it in regular use already. Fwiw I think it's a term that there isn't really a lot of use in preserving, especially since its original meaning is so divorced from current reality. Current parlance for what people actually mean when they say third world is usually "developing world" which is in some ways better (it at least implies it's something that changes over time) but also carries a lot of awkward colonialist baggage.