Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
by Suzanne Hadley Gosselin on 03/01/2007 at 2:10 PM
Maybe you've caught the buzz surrounding the new show dreamed up by Survivor creator Mark Burnett. Its premise: ask ordinary Americans the textbook questions that your typical fifth-grader should know and that most adults forgot. Answer 11 questions correctly and you win $1 million. A sample of this week's questions:
True or false? A turtle is an amphibian. (False; it is a reptile)
How many sides in a heptagon? (Seven)
Can you name the five Great Lakes? (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior)
Yesterday morning, I giggled hearing a radio caller attempt to answer the 11 questions that had been asked on the show the night before. She only answered three correctly. I shouldn't have been so smug; I only got six right.
At first I was miffed by my utter forgetfulness of grade school knowledge. Then I thought: When do I actually need to know how many pencils are in a gross? (The answer is 144.) Obviously, some of the knowledge gained in elementary school is arbitrary and designed to build a foundation for further learning. And we as adults feel obliged to discard many of the facts we don't use. Still, it hurts to be dumber than an 11-year-old.
Education news blogger Alexander Russo says the show could be compelling if it doesn't turn into a train wreck of adult ignorance. "Most parents," he points out, "are effectively on this game show every night."
Burnett says 5th Grader "is not a mean show. We poke fun at people, but they don't get destroyed. They end up laughing at themselves."
Maybe the show will motivate adults to brush up on some of the basics they've forgotten. For all of us who will someday deal with a fifth-grader — or are currently dealing with one — it's not a bad idea.
1. Zeph Greenwell said the following at 2:48 PM on Mar 1:
If they were asking you fifth grade math questions, most people would be able to answer with ease. The ambiguity of these questions lead to an inability to answer. Who cares how many pencils are in a gross? Some things you never need to know. I wonder why they're even bothering fifth graders with this useless information.
2. John said the following at 3:08 PM on Mar 1:
Somewhere floating around the Internet (I'll let you find it if your web skills are as good as a fifth grader's) there is a copy of an examination given to Kansas eighth-graders circa 1895. While some of the questions relate to technical farming matters, the questions posed concerning grammar, history, mathematics, etc. would stump many of today's college graduates, to say nothing of our eighth-graders (whose grasp of computer science, to be fair, is probably a lot better than their 19th-century counterparts). Still, it makes one think; American education has been progressively dumbed-down over the decades. Those who have seen Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" feature on "The Tonight Show" will know what I am talking about.
If I didn't know better, I would almost wonder whether there's a plot to keep Americans vacuous, ignorant and stupid. We're easier to control and less likely to ask the hard questions of our leaders.
3. loveboundless said the following at 3:17 PM on Mar 1:
You learn about different things if you are curious ... to broaden your horizons and realize that life is fascinating. When you are curious you also have a great imagination. It makes life interesting and truly well lived. It's a foundation of living fully every day. You were right Mr. Zeph. No one needs to know how many pencils are in a gross. But it isn't about that. It's about the principle of being curious in general and never stop learning. It is sad to see that so many people know so little or could care less about what is going on outside of their circle of comfort. I bet if you were to ask people who was the latest celebrity to die they would know. Of course the TV does a fine job in educating people all this nonsense.
4. Simon said the following at 3:37 PM on Mar 1:
John, I've seen that test online. Here it is:
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Featured/BeatTheEighthGrader.html
In my learning experience, applying and using what I've learned has been the best way to retain it. Most of what I've "learned" in college hasn't been that useful, and I don't remember much of it. But if it isn't something you're going to use, why lament losing it? If I wanted to re-learn anything, Google and Wikipedia are always there to help.
John, here is something you may find interesting:
http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/devi/hs/against_school.html
5. Mike Theemling said the following at 3:59 PM on Mar 1:
Actually, the anecdote regarding the difficult elementary school test (propogated as an 8th grade test actually) is a hoax.
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.htm
However, the author of the debunking article accurately points out that just because someone didn't retain a piece of knowledge from 20+ years ago does not necessarily mean he/she is not "smarter" than a 5th grader. It simply means that person didn't remember everything taught to them in 5th grade assuming they were even taught how much was in a gross.
As I commented in an earlier blog regarding the usefulness of college, it's not so much the actual knowledge itself which is important (unless you plan on going into a very specific field in which such a plethora of trivia is important such as law or medicine) as much as it is the thinking process (how to find information, how to learn quickly, working independently and in a group, etc.).
For the record, I knew all of the above questions except one of the Great Lakes (Lake Hurion). Maybe I could win a million dollars.
6. Ted Slater said the following at 5:03 PM on Mar 1:
Mike is right about that particular hoax, but it's true that we had higher expectations about children's learning ability a century or two ago.
Consider, for example, the New England Primer, a textbook that was standard in most elementary schools for hundreds of years. Here's a link to the 1777 version ( http://www.johansens.us/sane/education/primer.htm ) and to the 1843 edition ( http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/nep/ ).
Check out the vocabulary and concepts.
7. JBurke said the following at 6:07 PM on Mar 1:
I taught 8th grade language arts for several years at a school of excellence (according to NCLB) and I was blown away by what my students did NOT know! They couldn't tell me a verb from a noun, a fragment from a sentence, and fiction from nonfiction. I would be mortified if they were able to pass a test I was not!
8. Adam said the following at 9:18 PM on Mar 1:
Ya, education has suffered greatly. Critical thinking is just not something most people want to do anymore. I thought that the atheists said that with them in charge of the public schools, we would have much more tough minded thinking.
In fact, I heard an interesting illustration of the difference in education from the past not so long ago. It turns out that if you wanted to be a pastor of a Puritan congregation in the 1600's, you not only had to know Greek, but you also had to be able to engage in a debate in Greek!
God Bless,
Adam
9. John said the following at 3:56 AM on Mar 2:
Well, Mike Theemling, I stand corrected: evidently (if Snopes is to be believed) the test is a hoax. (I knew it was too good to be true.)
Nevertheless, should we as Christians not strive to glorify our Saviour in all things, intellectual and non-intellectual? Should we not declare the glory of God in academic excellence, including the study of Creationism?
Let it not be said that Christians are naive and ignorant. Let us be the best of the best, so that our enemies have no occasion to accuse us.
10. John M. said the following at 7:52 AM on Mar 2:
I think it's good to know how many are in a gross (it's not just for counting pencils). If you're going to read anything written before 1900 (i.e. 98% of the good literature that exists), you are going to run into terms like these. I can't think of anything I learned in school that wasn't important.
11. Bethany said the following at 7:44 PM on Mar 4:
At the same time, we have to deal with so much more information on a day to day basis than most of our forefathers had to in a year. I heard one time that there is more information in one Sunday New York Times than the average person in the middle ages came across in his/her life!
My grandfather, who got his Ph.D. in Biology back in the '50s pointed out that even when he was graduate school, he never had to memorize the Krep's cycle because it had not been discovered yet!
12. Zeph Greenwell said the following at 12:01 PM on Mar 5:
"You were right Mr. Zeph. No one needs to know how many pencils are in a gross. But it isn't about that. It's about the principle of being curious in general and never stop learning."
You're right that people should never stop learning, but if you learn it and forget it can you really say you ever learned it at all? What is more important is that you learn things that are useful. So what if you don't know how many units are in a gross, or how many feet are in a mile, or how many cans of soup you would have to stack on top of each other to reach the moon. The important thing is you learn things you can use everyday. If you spend all your time memorizing information you can easily look up you've only wasted time you could have spent learning something useful.
Also, don't call me Mr. Zeph. I post my last name for a reason.
13. CLH said the following at 12:22 PM on Mar 5:
Speaking as a mother of a fifth-grader, I've only caught parts of a couple episodes with my daughter, but we've enjoyed it. One complaint: If only Fox would air it before the bedtimes of fifth-graders! (Where we are, it's always been on after 9 p.m., thus the reason we haven't seen all the episodes.) But I have noticed this year in her curriculum some information I've long forgotten, or maybe never learned though she's going through the same private school curriculum from which I learned. For example, in science, she's learning a lot of nitty-gritty information about weather (whereas, I'm most concerned with what tomorrow's temperature will be and whether it will rain/snow). Quite impressive, the students grasp the concepts, in that course and others -- because when the bar is set high, students generally don't feel pressured, but rather they simple achieve: because they can. We should never set the bar low. Even public school students who've come into my daughter's parochial school, decidedly behind the private-school students in their achievement, catch up pretty quickly without much trouble.
And I agree with John M. and loveboundless, that the actual process of learning (really, teaching oneself to learn) is the value, not just grasping/memorizing facts. And JBurke, yikes! Not knowing the basics of grammar by 8th grade is scary! So glad the 5th graders in my daughter's school are way beyond the basics: They know the parts of speech and parts of a sentence, and they're now building on good writing skills in preparation for middle-school and high-school writing, and the written portion of the SAT.
14. Leah said the following at 5:50 PM on Mar 5:
I don't think the New England primer is anything special. It's got pretty simple concepts, and of course the language is different- people 300 years ago spoke differently to us. Maybe not quite like that, but since when does understanding old english easily make you any more intelligent?
Had the book touched on actual doctrines and theology, or algebra or trigonometry, or the like, *then* I would have been impressed. But of the parts I looked at, the concepts were nothing particularly advanced. I knew all that when I was a kid.
15. Robert J Espe said the following at 7:32 AM on Mar 6:
Regarding the above staments about why we teach useless information to schoolchildren: It's not a conspiracy, boring potential American entrepeneurs into people willing to work in offices and factories is an acknowledged educational mission, you just have to know where to look.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm