The new hit show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” has made us think. Well, truthfully, we embarassed ourselves in the office by playing the online version of the game, then it made us think.

The show puts an average adult against five fifth-graders of moderately average (yeah, right) intelligence.

When some of us took the quiz in the office we passed with flying colors – the second time around.

This show raises questions about the education system in America, and actually proves a lot of our theories true.

First, some of the adults who lose don’t do it because they aren’t educated, they just haven’t been filled with the randomness that is found in our textbooks. We think this proves that half of the information found in our textbooks isn’t really all that useful and we are only going to read every other page of our books from now on.

Not really, we’d like to graduate at some point.

The only people who are going to know what continent the Inca civilizations were concentrated on are history majors and maybe anthropologists. In all likelihood, a math major would never know this, nor would they ever use the knowledge.

We are not advocating the cessation of the acquisition of knowledge, but some of it is just pointless to anyone but Ken Jennings.

We are all told – “trust us, you will use this when you get into the real world,” but those statements are often not true. There is no way that education can be concentrated for each person, but don’t lie to us. If we don’t need to remember something, then why make us memorize it and hang the grade over our heads?

However, this show does show us that we need to respect children more in our culture. We’ve all been told as children that our opinion doesn’t matter, after all, we were just 12 years old – what did we know? Except we could give an articulate argument about the best Saturday morning cartoon. Well, these 5th graders do know a lot, even if some of it isn’t worth their time.

We need to take each generation for what it’s worth, and often its children that teach adults things we’ve forgotten about.

Except we bet there are still some big kids on campus that can still argue about the best cartoon.