“When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all...”
-Paul Simon
Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? is another in the long line of hit prime-time game shows that have filled the airwaves recently, a new take on the tried and true trivia show formula. The premise of the show taps into our fascination with our own collective stupidity. Perhaps this is a cynical view of the show, but it's the reason viewers flocked to its premiere. People wanted to see grown-ups stumble over fifth-grade level trivia, lacking knowledge they should have but don't. Watching the show, however, it becomes apparent that the real hook of the show is not the idiocy of the contestants (because they are generally competent), but the uselessness of the information we learned back in grade school.
I've watched a few episodes
Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? and every time I don't know the answer to a question, it's difficult to be angry with myself. My initial reaction is always, “These bits of knowledge lack any practical value.” That is, to say, the crap we learned back in grade school isn't necessary information. I'm not going to turn this into an indictment of our education system (that's a whole other discussion, and not something we need to mull over on a TV site), but I do think that the level of importance we place on random knowledge comes at the expense of more integral aspects of self-betterment and education, like reading, writing and critical thinking.
I know that in grade school one of the main areas of emphasis is learning how to learn. Kids need to condition themselves to take in information, memorize it and process it. This is all fine and good; the brain needs to be exercised at that age. However, you can't help but think while watching a show like
Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? that a lot of the time spent memorizing dates in History class and learning about algae in Science class was a monumental waste of time. Personally, me not being a big science guy, I don't particularly care about biology and chemistry. If I could retroactively erase those classes from my life and spend those hours studying something else (like English, Literature or Film), I would gladly do it.
We tend to forget about the things we aren't interested in. There's a reason I can recite the entire roster of the 1995-96 Seattle Sonics or the entire cast of Saved by the Bell (along with their collective filmographies), but can't tell you the difference between fission and fusion. An outsider might say, “Well, that may be okay for you, but it's more important to give future Nuclear physicists a background in science that it is to give future TV writers a background in Peter Engel-produced Saturday morning television.”
Okay, that makes sense. That line of thinking has almost always been completely valid. However, now that we're in the era of freely available information, a time where if I want to become a relative expert on Japan's Meiji Restoration, all I have to do is head on over to Wikipedia and expand from there. So, if we can agree that general knowledge (i.e. facts) are available in an unprecedented and universal way, then why wouldn't we have our youngsters focus on aspects of education that require real teaching and practice and expert feedback. One of the largest deficiencies in our grade-school level kids is their reading and writing abilities. Since I'm a writer I'm biased, but people don't read much these days, sticking to magazines and MySpace as their recreational activities of choice. Since kids aren't reading as much as they should and if a child wants to learn about something they can just hit up the internet, why not start emphasizing things like reading and writing to a greater extent in school?
I can't stress enough how badly I would've loved to take more classes in Rhetoric or Literature or Creative Writing when I was younger. Those are things that, to become proficient in, kids need to practice. Class time is valuable for grade school kids, and they're spending a significant portion of that time learning things they'll either soon forget or never need in the first place.
The problem, though, is that without this random knowledge we wouldn't have shows like
Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?, which would be a shame.
-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of FOX.com)