Hey -- I never said anything about the Geography Bee. I'm not saying it doesn't have its flaws, but overall it's a fairly reasonable competition. I competed in and enjoyed it, and as far as I know, actual study rather than list-memorizing is the preferable tactic for success. And Anthony, I made the final 10 (well, I placed tenth) in Florida as a fourth-grader... and never got that far again. Take that for what it's worth. As for the question of parents perhaps pushing thir kids excessively, I don't think anyone's saying that's true of _all_ parents of these children. However, you're also dealing with parents who home-school their children, and while not all of THOSE parents are hurting their children's chances in the future, I'd have to say that in the majority of cases, home-schooling is not good for a child -- even if the parent is competent, listening to only one teacher for one's whole childhood can severely warp one's intellectual development. But even outside of that whole argument, even if controlling parents are not present in all cases, they're certainly present a lot of the time. Anyway, I'm just saying that this whole Spelling Bee thing gets far more publicity than it deserves. We're dealing with a competition in which list-memorizing is the primary determinant of success. I'm not going to say it's the ONLY attribute needed, and I'm not going to say it's absolutely necessary (after all, I almost made Nationals -- if I had been able to spell "shako", I would have placed at least second -- without memorizing a single list, and I'm sure there are people with more natural talent than me) but I never met one of these kids who didn't spend a ridiculous amount of time memorizing lists. Anyway, by the time these kids get to the far reaches of Nationals, they're dealing with information which is, basically, useless and obscure trivia to them, and they aren't comprehending it -- they don't know the words, they just know the spellings.
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