Are You Smarter Than an Editor?
September 15, 2008
It was irritating enough when Fox Television came out with Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and it became a hit with people who related to Jeff Foxworthy’s earlier comedy about rednecks… but I sort of expect better from magazine editors. So I was more than a little irked to find Disney’s new magazine “Wondertime” in my mail box with the cover showing a headline “Are You Smarter Than a 1st Grader? take (and fail) our quiz.”
I guess I just expect more of print editors than I do television producers. I mean “Are You Better Educated Than a 5th Grader?” isn’t going to draw the standard Fox prime time audience, now is it? Nor I suspect would “What Did You Forget Between 5th Grade and Now?”
But if you’re sending me a free, unsolicited magazine in the hopes that I’ll consider it a good enough source for parenting advice to later subscribe to it? You had better hire both writers and editors who understand that there’s a difference between “smarter than” and being able to recall facts that you learned by rote memorization when you were eleven (or six in the case of the 1st graders.)
Honestly. It’s bad enough that Fox has managed to convince such a large portion of the population that intelligence is directly correlated to what ‘factoids’ you remember from your elementary education years (yes, Jeopardy! did a good enough job of that for years without a misnomer) but they weren’t trying to sell me something. Yeah, I didn’t give their show sponsors high marks for choosing to advertise during that show either.
Personally, I know that I’m smarter than many a 5th grader – and 1st grader for that matter – but I also know that Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein were both that age once and their heirs are probably out there learning math right now. Hopefully, they are intelligent enough to be able to realize that a good education is priceless, but so is a good editor. Wondertime ought to consider hiring one.
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