by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?
Well, you'd be pretty stupid if you weren't.
That's not to say a game show couldn't be made of the question. After all, people in this country are very stupid. Hell, even college kids are mostly ignorant, lazy and lacking in critical-thinking skills.
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The Jeff Foxworthy-hosted "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" is a monument to our baffling lack of knowledge as a culture. Long division, writing in cursive and basic geography are just too hard for some adults it seems. And it's fun to watch children prove it. Or sad. You pick.
On one recent episode, a contestant was asked which continent shares its name with a country. Had she simply missed it, I just would have been a little disappointed. But at one point, she muttered to herself, trying to decide, "It's all of them, isn't it?"
A lot of us learn about
continents, and the fact that there are countries in them, in elementary school. This show hints otherwise, but it is not OK to forget that there's no country called Europe or South America.
By the way, if you don't know the answer to the question yet, look it up yourself. I'm not telling.
It's every person's responsibility to learn some basic facts about this world. This is especially true if your decisions influence major wars in which your country kills thousands of people. How can you trust your judgment of international politics if you can't remember the three branches of government?
If you think I'm being harsh on these contestants, it may have been a while since you actually saw a fifth-grader. Most of them are about 10 years old, which makes them slightly less helpless and confused than a poorly trained poodle. If they're consistently putting up a fight against adults in trivia contests, does that mean our adult population doesn't know what it's doing any more than the kid next door who can't stop picking his nose?
I don't find this funny. Call me old-fashioned, but it disturbs me when our society considers a battle of wits like this riveting entertainment. Just in case you forgot, our world doesn't work if everybody's an idiot. Our lives depend on people using their full, adult brain capacities. The U.S. Constitution came out of a tradition of hard thinking and persistent intellectual striving. Our medicines were produced as a result of countless hours of research by top scientists. Your car and computer were not invented by fifth-graders, either.
The point is, we all owe our lives to education and to people who actually use their brains. When a TV show like this glorifies idiocy and laziness, it engenders a sense of helplessness in the population. "I couldn't possibly do anything important, because I'm from a culture where people's brains don't develop past age 10," it could lead you to think.
It's not cool to be stupid. It's not right to stay that way without trying to better yourself. And it's not OK to be stupider, at age 30, than a fifth-grader.
