Jeopardy Flappity

Two camps have sprung up regarding the recent "Kids Week" Jeopardy session flap.   Several articles have been written at various news outlets.  Both the NY Daily News   and the Daily Mail UK   have given coverage to what happened to the runner up of the contest.  Not to be outdone, FoxNews too, had to have their say.

I hate to criticize young kids .... they are what their parents have made them.  However, I would definitely side with the writer below in her analysis:

Gabriel Garnica writing at FamilySecurityMatters:
.....Jeopardy Spelling Uproar Reflects America’s Downward Spiral. With the world, and our nation, falling apart at the seams around us, you might wonder what would drive me to write about a Connecticut eighth-grader's spelling mistake on Jeopardy. Actually, I wish to focus  more on the reactions to this error than the error itself, which only reminds us that Thomas Hurley III, like all of us, is human. Perhaps his nerves got the best of him. Maybe he actually believed that his spelling of "emancipation" in "Emancipation Proclamation" as "emanciptation" was correct.  I am sure many of us, sweating under the gaze of a pressurized, televised game show, might mess up here and there.  Had Thomas, his parents, and the scores of people expressed their dismay over what happened and left things at that, this would be over.  However, their uproar and outcry over this incident only crystallize this country's present intellectual, academic, and societal deterioration.

Thomas was competing in the "Jeopardy!  Kids Week" competition which was taped last February and aired recently and was a distant second to the eventual winner.  The answer to the final question was "Emancipation Proclamation", which the first place contestant spelled correctly, but which Thomas spelled  "emanciptation".  As it turned out, the child's mistake cost him nothing because the rules for Kids Week clearly state that only the winner of a round gets to keep the money earned, with second place receiving a consolation prize of $ 2,000.  In this case, the eventual winner, 7th-grader Skyler Hornback, broke the record for winnings for Kids Week with a total of $ 66,600.  Despite these facts, the reactions of the contestant, his parents, and a large part of the public epitomize precisely why this country is on the slippery slope to dope.

Truth be told, we are caught between two divergent, but equally destructive, notions in this society.  Half of the time, we are told that winning and achievement should be downplayed so as to not "offend" those who fail or do not achieve. The other half of the time, we are raising kids who think that they always have to win somehow and that losing is the end of the world. In view of the sheer absurdity of these two inconsistent and illogical views, is it any wonder that this society handles winning, losing, success, and failure about as well as it votes.
Our public education system spends more time and energy coddling and appeasing lazy troublemakers than rewarding and recognizing dedicated achievers. We have kids' baseball games where the score is not kept, fielding errors are not even discussed, and oblivious daydreamers are voted Player of The Game. Precision, accuracy, and fairness have been hijacked by fuzzy feelings, competitive socialism, and preferences for the less successful.  We wonder why we have lost our edge in the world, in our standards, in our critical and independent thinking skills, and in our standards of success.

Thomas should have simply expressed his dismay regarding losing, expressed his just pride in coming in second, praised the winner, and moved on. Rather, he told us that he was "cheated", was "pretty upset", would no longer be a fan of the show and, as a final nail on the old poor................