Two in one blow: Another quiz show scandal (remember the old one with Charles Van Doren back in the 1950s?) and another talent show narrowly averted.
“Our Little Genius,” a new Fox quiz show about child geniuses competing for huge amounts of money that was set to begin on Fox next week, has been put on the back burner — or maybe even permanently cancelled — because of “concerns about the integrity of the show.” The producer released a statement saying “he recently discovered that there was an issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during the preproduction of ‘Our Little Genius,’” and that “as a result, I am not comfortable delivering the episodes without reshooting them.”
Did someone give the little tykes the answers? To those who know how to read Flack (the Esperanto of our times), the answer lies in the vast and murky territory in between yes and no. To the rest of us who speak English, the answer is “yes.”
All of this is neither here nor there, however, since the concept of a TV quiz show for child geniuses is revolting. Explain to me the difference between pushy parents who hussy up little girls and trundle them off to child beauty pageants, where they then flaunt their pre-pre-pre-pubescent bodies for honor and money, and pushy parents who pump their kids full of information and then haul them off to a kid quiz show where they flaunt their knowledge about Obsidian rocks and Byzas from Megara? The one is for dumb beauty and the other for worthy knowledge, you say? Please. In both cases, we have vain, venal parents who raise their kids as if they’re trick dogs in a circus.
Pushy parents with genius kids have existed before. Leopold, Mozart’s dear papa, toured several European cities proudly showing off (for a fee) the talents of tiny little Wolfgang Amadeus and his sister Nannerl, and the results were that Mozart grew up to be Mozart and Nannerl grew up to be forgotten. In raising his son John Stuart Mill, the Scottish philosopher James Mill simply decided he needed to make of his son a genius in order to carry forward his philosophy of utilitarianism. (Fortunately, his son was indeed a genius, and that’s exactly what he went on to do.) James Mill started his kid off by teaching him Greek at the age of three, moving him on to Latin, Euclid and algebra when he reached the ripe old age of eight. Pushy parents of today’s little geniuses can always point to examples like these to justify their behavior.
It must be easy for pushy parents of geniuses who want to parade their kid on a TV quiz show to think to themselves, “My child might very well become a Mozart or a Mill, and I’m here to help nurture this gift.” But someone needs to remind them that men like Mozart and Mill were not run-of-the-mill geniuses, but extremely uncommon geniuses — the kind who don’t merely belong to their century, but to the ages. If they’re going to go the Leopold Mozart or James Mill route in raising their kids, they ought to be super-sure they have a first-rank genius before risking the mental health of their kids.
Every family is in essence a little fiefdom wherein the family home is the estate, the children are the serfs, and the parents the aristocrats who run things. Except in cases of out-and-out physical abuse, how parents treat their precious little serfs is entirely up to them. There’s nothing to be done with parents who offer their kids up as trick dogs—other than shaming them, which isn’t about to happen. Nor should laws be enacted to prohibit TV beauty pageants for toddlers or TV quiz shows for genius kids. People want them, and this is America, land of the free. Besides, everyone tries to show off their kids — or, if the kids are a wreck, at least put forth the best face possible on their situation. That’s what we do when we tell others about little Susie and Johnny.
Still, it would be brave if we’d face the truth: TV quiz shows for grammar-school kids are different in kind, but not in essence, from beauty pageants for three-year-olds. They both manifest not proper parental pride, but ugly parental vanity and venality. Aside from whatever damage is done to the kids involved, the saddest part is that an eager audience is always waiting for the next show.
One Response to Vanity, Thy Name Is Parent
v8573254 - January 12, 2010 at 9:44 am
And one shouldn’t forget the fictional family, the Glass family, from J.D. Salinger’s work.