Who Knows This S#!T!

A couple of nights ago, I was searching desperately for any sort of show on television worth watching. Surprisingly, I landed on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader and was almost immediately hooked.

I would consider myself average when it comes to intelligence. I'm certainly not a genius, but I'm in college and “learning.” I was surprised to find that in the entire hour, I only answered two questions right. One was about adverbs (yay!), and the other about Miami. Out of all the questions, most of them were certainly not ones I'd ever remembered learning in elementary school, then again I haven't been there in over ten years.

What took me for surprise (and also made me feel a little better about myself) is that no one in the room really knew any of these answers either. I didn't know that the ostrich was the fastest bird on foot, and I definitely didn't know what African country Adiss Ababa was the capital of, but neither did anyone else. Why didn't we know? Because we're all “old” in a sense that none of that information was important to us anymore.

So, why do teachers teach children stuff that no one really cares to know about, or needs to know about for that matter? I remember asking myself this question as a child, and still I have no answer. No child should go without learning the core subjects, but knowing that the hippo is indigenous to Africa won't really get you anywhere in life, and unless your a baker or a brewer, knowing the pints to cups conversion is basically useless.

I happened to stumble across a blog that brought up the same question I just raised. The blogger makes a great point – what's the purpose of memorizing these tidbits when google is at almost everyones fingertips? Technology is an inevitable solution to not knowing useless knowledge. Even though you can't google the capital of Zimbabwe while taking a test, if you need to know it in real life it's virtually right there. As a college student it serves me better to know what I need, and google what I don't.

When doctors and lawyers claim to America that they are not smarter than a fifth grader, they aren't lying, but to assume that they are less educated because they traded in their trivial knowledge for a degree is making an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”