The Bigsibling Blog

Being a loud and somewhat vociferous harbinger of the ‘dumbing down of America,’ I had to watch the premier last night of the new Fox television show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?“

This show is more-or-less a re-working of the hugely popular “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” where contestants are asked questions for dollar amounts.  It is somewhat simpler, there are ten questions to get to the $500 grand mark, then one more question (I think) to get to the million dollars.  The contestant can bow out at any time and take whatever money he has already won.

There are five fifth graders on the program which are there to give assistance to the contestant, should they need it.  There are three types of assistance, Peek, Copy and Save.

In Peek, the contestant can peek at the student’s answer, and choose whether or not to use that answer.  In Copy the contest must accept whatever answer the student has written.  In Save, if the contestant is wrong, and the student is correct, the contest is saved.

It seems there might be a glimmer of hope with our current crop of students – or at least they do not seem as dumbed down as possibly my generation.  The first contestant on the show was a guy my age, who graduated with a 3.0 GPA from UCLA majoring in US History.  He is now an attorney.  The question that did him in was “Who was the first American president to be impeached?”  This Einstein also didn’t know in which month Columbus day is celebrated. 

Of the four questions he was asked, he go zero right without the help of the fifth graders on the show.  He used up all three cheats, then quit and walked away with is $5K.  That shows me there is a lot to be concerned about as my generation gears up for ruling the country.  Maybe not the next president, but the one after that will certainly be a person who went through grade school in the 70’s, and high school and college in the 80’s.

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