Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? (no, you are not)
Filed under: Culture, Education
Life has always been cruel.
Despite the romanticization of eras distinctly more violent and racist than modern times by more conservatively minded folk, I can assure you that we used to do some pretty fucked up shit to each other. Looking back at history, it would seem that a great deal of this was done in the name of entertainment. As an example, I can remember learning about the crucifixion of Jesus in my Catholic school days and wondering why it seemed to be such a spectacle. As my teacher suggested, attending a crucifixion was actually a popular pastime in the mid to late Roman period, a fact that I have now internalized regardless of its veracity. I need only to point at the popularity of mixed-martial arts to illustrate that this desire for blood is still alive and well. There is even a submission in MMA (maybe) named in honor of this connection, as I have pictured below. Now, some might think that we have moved beyond satisfying these deeper, animalistic urges in favor of the arts and narcotics, but then again, my experience largely tells me otherwise.
One might initially be thankful that we no longer publicly torture and shame those accused of particularly heinous wrongdoings, but this is to misunderstand the nature of torture in modern society entirely. It is not so much that we have morally progressed beyond the need for torture as a society, but rather: from my perspective it seems as if a great deal of the efforts of mankind over the course of the last several centuries have been dedicated to creating better and more inventive ways to torture each other. The smartest people in any given culture used to dedicate themselves to helping society move forward as a whole, but apparently somewhere along the line we became more interested in developing nuclear weapons and “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Even considering this however, you might be surprised to find that the cruelest and most devious forms of torture conducted during the Bush administration did not take place at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib; rather, it was filmed live in front of a studio audience in sunny Hollywood, California.
“Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader”, at least in its original form as it appeared on FOX from 2007–2009, sticks out in my mind as a particularly sadistic iteration within a format that thrives upon the suffering of others (game-shows). This can be explained in part by the fact that the idea for the show was supposedly conceived by Howard Stern, although somehow the product that finally made it on to television was even less suited for children. As the name suggests, the program consists of an individual accompanied by a “class” of child actors as they attempt to answer a series of ten questions taken from real grade-school textbooks, with an eleventh, million-dollar question available if all the previous questions had been answered correctly. The contestant has a series of “cheats” available in this process wherein they are able to consult one of the child actors (a famously worldly group) regarding their potential answer for the question. In some cases the contestant has the option to simply copy the answer of a given student without even looking, although I can’t for the life of me imagine a situation wherein this would be preferable to answering the question myself. Can you imagine losing $100,000 because an eight year old thought the capital of Vermont was “New York”, even though you knew in the back of your head that it was “Montpelier”? Even thinking about it makes my stomach sink, and I don’t even like money that much.
Like any good game-show, the watchability of “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” depends upon its host: Jeff Foxworthy of Blue Collar Comedy Tour fame. The pain of watching hundreds of thousands of dollars vanish before your very eyes must be excruciating in and of itself, but turning around and seeing the “You might be a redneck…” guy chuckling to himself afterwards would be enough to send me into a bloodlust that would leave both of us, and maybe a few students, dead on the studio floor. Foxworthy, who has since passed on hosting duties to the only man who can match his intellectual prestige (pro-wrestler John Cena), would read the questions off to the contestants with a drawl that exudes mockery regardless of the context. He would often spend several minutes grilling and second-guessing a contestant on particularly easy questions, even forcing a few poor souls to reconsider what they were once sure of. Once they inevitably got a question wrong, Foxworthy would then revert back to his earnest self and express his condolences: partially due to the money lost, and partially due to the underlying knowledge that the contestant would have to return to their pitiful existence as a mortgage broker, or account manager, or school principal (a surprising number of contestants worked in education) while he continued to make millions with an IQ of about 70. This is is not for the faint of heart folks.
The cruelty of the show comes full circle if, and normally when the contestant either gets a question wrong or decides to walk away with their winnings thus far. The only milestone available is the $25,000 mark that a contestant reaches after getting five questions correct, which can lead to particularly gut-wrenching situations wherein a contestant misses the million dollar bonus question and walks away with just enough money for a new Prius. As Foxworthy is quick to remind the contestants throughout the game, if they do anything other than run the table they must turn, face the camera, and tell their beloved friends and family what they already know all to well: “I am not smarter than a fifth grader”. They rarely are, but then again, neither are you.
It is this element of the program that always struck me as being particularly torturous.
There is an unspoken, underlying understanding that most Americans who watch the show approach the program with. It is not that the contestants on the show are particularly stupid, as many of them have advanced degrees as Foxworthy is quick to note when someone gets stumped by a 3rd grade math question. Nor are the questions particularly hard, as again, they come from real textbooks and are rarely so difficult that the elude a majority of the audience. Rather, the failure of the program to produce more than a few million-dollar winners likely comes as a result of the fact that more than half of Americans cannot read at a 6th grade level.
The deeper malice of the show becomes apparent when one takes a look at the state of the contemporary American educational system. Despite spending more per pupil on education than any other country outside of Luxembourg (which may or may not even exist as far as I’m concerned), educational outcomes and testing scores in the United States lag behind most other developed nations. Not unlike Brooklyn Nets, we have a tendency to overspend and under-perform. Like the Nets, we also have problems convincing everyone to get vaccinated, but that’s a different matter entirely. In any case, the issues endemic within our nations classrooms are becoming clearer and clearer by the day. We split the atom, we put a man on the moon, and yet for some reason, we still have not figured out how to read.
When some poor schmuck flunks out after the first or second question, it is not just an embarrassment to the schmuck themselves. It is also an embarrassment to us all. Schools in the United States are in pretty bad shape, and largely getting worse. The fact that a majority of the top universities in the world are in the United States suggests that these educational shortcomings domestically are not exactly issues of quality, but rather, issues of access and equity. There are many institutions in the United States that are more than capable of teaching our children what they need to know, the issue here is that these institutions are not accessible to every child.
A great deal of this comes from the manner in which schools are funded, and how these funds are distributed. Schools depend upon taxes, chiefly property taxes, to keep the lights on; but when property values around a given school district are low, there isn’t much of a tax base to draw from. As a result of this, children in wealthier neighborhoods who could easily get by at an average school continue to enjoy the finest classroom luxuries and teachers, while the poor kids often go without. Good luck approaching the pearl-clutching suburbanites and telling them that you want to take some of their property taxes and distribute them elsewhere in the “inner city” (think of the type of person who says “inner city” in a disparaging tone). They would almost certainly dismiss you as a communist and go back to their gated communities, a statement made particularly ironic when considering China’s math and reading test scores.
The issue that one here must consider is this: what impact does this subpar educational impact have upon life in the United States? As I would think, it plays a significant role in a number of different issues plaguing American society. The gaps in educational attainment between socioeconomic and racial segments in the United States will likely continue to manifest themselves through disparities in wealth that grow bigger year after year. The Gini coefficient — a flawed, and yet useful economic indicator used to measure inequality — currently stands at .415 as of 2019 up from .38 in 1991 and far from the sub .35 numbers that were the norm in the 1970’s. A bigger number here indicates a society with more inequality, so from this one can gather that wealth in the United States continues to concentrate; and as others have noted, I think these disparities in education play a major role here. This works both ways too, as wealth inequality leads to gaps in educational attainment and outcomes that in turn manifest themselves in greater and greater levels of wealth inequality.
I would also think that the failures of our educational system have an impact upon the quality and nature of our democracy. When your political system hinges upon the average American having some knowledge of domestic and international affairs, you might be concerned to find that — as was previously suggested — the average voter has a middle-school level of literacy. This means that we have to spend countless hours and millions of dollars arguing over problems that might not even exist in reality; while important issues (like education) elsewhere go ignored.
In looking at the news or attending a school board meeting, one would come to the conclusion that “critical race theory” or “transgender indoctrination” are the two biggest issues in modern education. This is of course because the parents at the forefront of these conversations have not entered a classroom in decades, and have the media literacy of a Dalmatian. As tends to be the case, real issues are ignored while hypothetical concerns get a majority of the attention. Because of this, I don’t expect much to change in the coming years despite the work of activists and scholars working around the clock to enact reform. The answers are there, as there is plenty of valid research that other nations have applied successfully in order to better themselves. The issue here is that despite knowing the answers, we cannot apply them. We don’t know how. We are — myself included — too stupid to get smart; and as I see it, in the absence of major shifts in the sociopolitical landscape, we will not learn to think good for a very long time.
