*The 'Kids' beat us*

Kudos to the team from RJC who pipped us to the Chancellor's Challenge Shield i.e. the general knowledge and current affairs quiz we were suppose to win so that this poor law student could pay for his transportations this month.

They were good, no doubt about it and gave us a run for our money that's for sure. But in all fairness, we killed ourselves too. In particular, we screwed up the section on National Education so badly that it was funny, nay, hillarious even.

This was in the second round of the tournament and the format was similar, if not identical to the Singapore's Brainiest format i.e. categories we could pick and answer. Here's the three categories we picked. Sports, Politics and Political Science, and last and definately least, National Education.

Now, in sports, we score a total of 10 questions right out of a possible 15 of which we only managed to answer 13 before running out of time. In politics, we managed a total of 13 correct answers out of 14. There was some excitement in that round because I was standing up and shouting out the answers, mostly because the screen was fuzzy and the microphone was way out of position for me to answer into. Oh and my ability to speed read long questions and differentiate between Liberalism and Libertarianism.

Now we come to the category of National Education. Consider the team we had. There was David, Singapore's Second Brainiest Scholar and the depth of his knowledge intimidates me. He actually challenged the answer of one of the questions and was eventually showm to be right, forcing a tie-break and then demonstrating his knowledge of 16th century history by knowing exactly about the various outcomes of the battles Attina the Hun fought. Then there's Her, your average reasonable debater who reads 3 online papers, 2 prints, The Economist and a couple of journals. Admittedly the questions weren't to her particular strengths today. And well there's me.

And with the grand total of a number of decades of education and reading we only managed FOUR (4) correct answers. Hell, we could have answered ANY OTHER CATEGORY better.

So has National Education failed? Going by what happened today, I think that's an unfortunate yes. Heh, oh well, there's always the next one.

Peace!