Exploitation at its finest, and while I saw this before
Magnolia I immediately thought of this show once I saw the
film. They generally, from my experience, tested
rote memorization skills. There were a few
math and similar
logic problems, but our
trivia based culture became evident.
An interesting thing to examine while watching this was the demographics of the children chosen. While there were a lot of white kids, no doubt, but a strangely large amount of Asian kids, and, IIRC, a lack of children of African decent and Latino origins, and others. Who won is not of importance, what is is the personification of stereotype. Ideally, of course, there would be an perportionate amount of kids per ethnicity as they have in the general populace. This was not the case. It seems to silently reinforce the "Asian kids are smart; white kids are okay; the rest, well . . . let's put them in special schools" stereotype. Or, perhaps, it's indicative of the school system's bias, where kids that live in the inner city don't recieve the education and/or recognition they deserve.
While many anthropologists think that race is a myth, but rather a scale, its application to what is, all things considered, a child's contest, like Little League or whatever, is unacceptable. But that might just be me.
Also, I noticed a lot of boys in the audience. I'll let someone else rant about that.