Don't Wanna Be an American Idiot

I am guilty of falling prey to the beguiling allure of absolutely shit TV. I watched the first season of Canada’s Next Top Model. I got caught in the roadwreck that was the beginning of American Idol this year. I even caught myself lingering on a Best of Jerry Springer special, watching in horrified fascination the multiple bust-ups that broke out over numerous bleeped-out screaming arguments. And that was in 2006.



But I couldn’t watch Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? beyond the first show. Neither could Heather Mallick, it seems.

The show pits tertiary-educated individuals against a “class” of 5 grade five students. The aim of the well-mediated and incisively edited show is to make fun of the adults, who have great difficulty with America’s 5th grade curriculum. But this is nothing new – we make fun of the stupid and their sage comments regularly: the character Vicky Pollard on Little Britain and the show Talking to Americans with Rick Mercer are two examples. The documentary Stupidity looks at a culture with access to education and knowledge, but chooses ignorance.

Mallick asserts that the show has taken a new turn in the bankability of stupid: there is lots of money to be made off stupid people (she cites the London Sun, a British tabloid, as a moneymaking example), and there are lots of stupid people to make fun of, but Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? makes money off making fun of stupid people. Follow?

This is where I disagree with Mallick. The show is so carefully mediated that you would think the contestants are reading from a script. They um and ah, and talk through what little they remember of the subject from grade school. The external monologues build up the dramatic tension to maddening heights while we sit on the edges of our armchairs, wondering if the Harvard grad is going to know how to find the area of a triangle with a height of 6 inches and a base of 2. And just when they settle on answer c, the host takes us to a commercial break and we throw our arms in the air along with the well-educated plonker who really isn’t sure if the answer is 6, but man, winning fifty grand would be good…

Mallick worries that we will be caught in this stupidity cycle: “It's a circle of government and industry working in tandem: the Bush Administration guts the American education system, which makes Fox programming attractive to larger numbers of people, who are then ridiculed by people like me, but now also by Fox itself.”

But can the American education system be that bad if every single one of the kids on the episode I watched got every single answer right? Perhaps it is a case of the kiddies being immersed in the curriculum and remembering what they’d learned a few weeks prior, whereas the adults have not used the formula to calculate the area of a triangle since grade 10 math class.

Or maybe this interminable stream of reality shows is our culture sluicing out the last of a stupid generation, wiping the slate clean for the next generation of kids (not one of them left behind).

I’ll end with an anecdote from Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans to illustrate my point: when asking an American woman her thoughts about grade 7 students not being able to find their home state on an unmarked map of Canada, she answers without a beat, while her son, aged 8 or 9, holds a quizzical look on his face for several seconds before announcing, “Hang on - Canada has provinces!”*



* the clip is right at the end, but the video is worth the 7 and a half minutes...