So, did anyone else catch the "World's Smartest Kid" thing on FOX tonight? If you missed it, here's a quick summary:

50 kids, all under 12, answering questions that were WAY harder than the questions you see on Millionaire.. in 2 hours they managed to narrow it down to 1 child that they considered the "smartest".

Do you think this is just totally wrong? Is this just setting the kids up for more teasing when they go back to school if they weren't the winner? Is the winner of this show going to have a super-big ego now and think he's God?

Are the parent's in the wrong?

-- Angela (fleegle@gdi.net), May 10, 2000

Answers

In my personal opinion I dont think very highly of it. The kind of kids that were like that when I was growing up were always better in school than me, made better grades, weren't bored to death with it, they had "book smarts" which means they had the attnetion spans to put up with reading crap and remembering it regardless of the content. But when it came time for real world oriented challenges I always smoked everyone.

I really dont think its a fair way to rate someones intelligence in general whether thats what they were doing or not. I mean a test is written by a person to begin with, who said they have the right to test my skills? I say the whole memorizing what you read deal should be a catagory of its own and it really doesnt mean someone is smart. Ask the same group of kids what they would do to create a more efficient and environmentally friendly power plant. Or to explain magnetism. Thats would show some real brains in my book.

-- Goat (AngryGoatBoy@hotmail.com), May 11, 2000.