In my daily news browse, I came upon an article about Fox's Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?. It seemed almost gleeful about how many adults could not answer general knowledge questions a 5th grader can answer.

But this begs a rather important question... Why is this knowledge important to an adult?

I want my president and military commanders to know which country lies across our northern border, but is it important if my plumber or electrician knows it? On the other hand, it's important for my electrician to know that watts = volts times amps, but is the lack of that knowledge going to hinder a copyright lawyer? Does the Secretary of Commerce need to know where the pituitary gland is? Does an endocrinologist need to know that Bolivia owns the second largest natural gas field in South America after Venezuela?

Primary education covers a wide selection of topics and knowledge, giving the children a broad foundation upon which to build. While a fifth grader may be able to forget where the second largest natural gas field in South America is without ever running into a situation in his/her life in which that information would have been vital to their success, the plain and simple fact is that at 10 years old, that child has neither the experience or maturity to decide whether they want to grow up to be an endocrinologist or work for the Commerce Dept. They need to know both, so that when they reach an age where choosing between medicine and public service becomes important, they can choose either.

Essentially, there is a ton of information we pick up in grade school, high school, and even the "general education" courses we take in college that we'll eventually forget. But until we've chosen a path in life that helps us determine which information we can wipe from those grey, mushy hard drives in our skulls, it's best to pack that storage unit with as much information as possible with as wide a variety as possible.

But once the choice has been made, the "use it or lose it" factor comes into play. I took Spanish for my foreign language requirement in college and was nearly fluent by the time I finished. Now, 15 years later, I'd be lucky to be able to define the subjunctive tense, much less conjugate it.

Just because a 5th grader knows something I learned and forgot, doesn't make them smarter than me. They don't know to turn into a skid. They don't know how to negotiate a lease. And most of them wouldn't know the pythagorean theorem (which actually can turn out to be VERY useful in a layperson's life).

The title "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader" falls into the trap of equating knowledge with intelligence. But if you measure intelligence as that which separates us from animals, the true measure is not our ability to memorize, but to reason and understand.

Take a piece of food and suspend it out of reach, then put a box in the corner of the room that we can stand on. A dog will stand beneath the food and jump for it or whine. A monkey may or may not go get the box and place it beneath the food, then stand on the box to get the food. A human, except when severely stupid, will always go get the box and stand on it to get the food. That is what makes us smarter than monkeys or dogs.

You want to know if I'm smarter than a 5th grader... put us in that room and see who takes longer to get the banana. But don't imply a 5th grader is smarter than me if he knows the number of sides in a trapezoid and I don't (I actually do, but I'm using an example from the article). What makes someone smart is not what they know, but their ability to use what they know to solve problems, and to an extent, how to use the act of deducing a solution to a problem to add to their knowledge.

If you take a set of obscure factoids I learned for a test 28 years ago and pit me against someone who has those factoids fresh in their brain from having to learn them for a test 28 days ago, you can engineer a situation in which they seem smarter than me. But if you take your average 5th grader and pit them against me in solving a problem that neither of us has any experience in solving, I'll wipe the floor with them 9 times out of 10.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.