From Spelling to Searching bee.

We take the spelling bee as an example to highlight why it is necessary to give up some skills of the past to learn new skills that will enhance the future.

Why do we celebrate the “spelling bee”?
Our children today have spell check on email/ on word/ xcel/ google and powerpoint. They complete close to 95% of their written tasks on these softwares.

Why do we celebrate the spelling bee? I am not sure we capture our surprise (dismay) at this. Infact we are surprised by the continued emphasis a lot of exams place (especially in India) on memorisation of facts. Perhaps in a country with very limited (PC penetration is about 5%) access to internet search tools, memorisation of facts is important.

But in the US, with a far higher degree of online search available through the PC or mobile phone, what’s the fun in continuing with a spell bee? (Wikipedia suggests this concept perhaps started in the 1700s with the emergence of reading and writing skills in the West).

Why don’t we have a “search bee” contest now for school kids? We ask them the most difficult questions, and the kids have PCs and access to any search engine (s) that they choose to get the answer in 3 minutes.

We take the spelling bee as an example to highlight why it is necessary to give up some skills of the past to learn new skills that will enhance the future.

We argued recently with friends of ours why the government should not incentivise the learning of ancient dance forms such as Bhrathnatyam and Kuchipudi. They were shocked.
“How can we lose our tradition like this? This is so irresponsible”, they said.

Our reaction was this:

- In the past 10,000 years, we have no ideas exactly how many forms of communication were learnt and forgotten(modified) as mankind evolved the complexity of his communication needs.

- In fact dance and songs, In ancient times lacking widespread reading and writing skills were only one way of recording stories and transmitting them. Now we have books/ photos and videos to do this recording and transmission. Why dance?

- What we know now is simply because we recorded in paintings or written form these cultural elements from the past 2000 years.

- But recording a cultural element itself preserves it for the future. Why force it to be learnt through incentives that can be applied to other educational and cultural needs.

- Why not create a museum for fine arts that has DVDs of every known cultural expression and detailed instructions on how to learn it in case someone wants to.

- But diverting resources to preserve a past in a country that lacks basic resources is a crime.

Anyway, we came back to this thought when the winner of the 2009 spelling bee in the US was announced on TV recently.

We are patenting our “search bee” idea. Its more relevant for the future.

Ritu and Venkat