The Dao of Learning

Accidental Blogger points me to a rather funny event, the yearly victory of some brown kid in the National Spelling Bee. 'I was nervous': Texas whiz kid beats teens in 2012 National Geographic Bee. This Texas whiz kid, Rahul Nagvekar, beat a prodigy from Wisconsin, Vansh Jain. Here were the 10 finalists for the GeoBee: - Raghav Ranga, Arizona - Varun Mahadevan, California - Anthony Stoner, Louisiana - Adam Rusak, Maryland - Karthik Karnik, Massachusetts - Gopi Ramanathan, Minnesota - Neelam Sandhu, New Hampshire - Rahul Nagvekar, Texas - Anthony Cheng, Utah - Vansh Jain, Wisconsin Speaking of bees, the National Spelling Bee is coming up. Here are the contestants (page down). And here's a list of the 2012 Intel Science Contest finalists. And winners of the American Mathematics Competition. I think it's great that kids from certain demographics do so well at these academic competitions. But I have to be honest and wonder if sometimes we aren't seeing individuals who are so focused on the measure, that they forget what we're trying to measure. God knows I think metrics are very important, but the pursuit of knowledge ultimately has nothing to do with a panel of judges or selection of correct answers. South Korea already exists, it's a fine enough country, we don't need to replicate it.