When I was 13, I was captain of my junior school general knowledge team. I know. Take a ticket, ladies. I’m not sure how it happened. One rainy afternoon we were all given a little quiz to do, and the next thing I knew I was sat in sports halls, quizzing competitively, with buzzers and judges. On a personal level I took some pride in fending off a strong rival for my spot; a young man with a thirst for understanding Napoleonic military uniform unusual at an age where most boys are learning to smoke and talk to girls.
Early on, I was left humiliatingly adrift by the question "What is the capital of Columbia?" Sniggers rippled through the audience of Just William-a-likes. Eventually our youngest member, a shy 11 year-old called Alex, who’d been introduced to me by a teacher earlier that day as "a bit quiet but very good", piped up against the rules, moved to action by my horrendous ignorance. “Bogota”, he said, before I had the chance to utter "Ankara" or some similar nugget of misinformation.
The boy’s name, as it turned out, was Alexander Guttenplan, and last year he romped home to victory in the final of University Challenge, at the helm of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His knowledge verged on the miraculous. He knew things that not only have I never known, but that I suspect nobody has ever known – certainly not all in one go and under the glare of the spotlight. In an earlier round he admonished Jeremy Paxman for having the temerity to suggest that he had guessed the answer to a question as 'WB Yeats'. Some chutzpah
This was not my first University Challenge connection. Two years ago Max Kaufman led Christ Church Oxford to a similarly emphatic competition victory. Max was the boy I kept out of the junior school team. I hadn’t been in a quiz for eight years, but in a fit of pique, I signed up to lead my own University Challenge team, from Clare College, Cambridge. My band of slightly bemused team-mates got to the auditions, whereupon we hit the rocks. We scored low. The others were fine. I was hopeless. Whatever it was – had been, all those years before – had gone.
Max’s knowledge of Napoleonic military uniform evidently expanded through the years. My own, by contrast, had withered like an old balloon, shrunk by videogames and cans of Kronenbourg. It is sad to realise there are things you no longer know, but even sadder, as I’ve discovered, to see the parade of facts you once could have known, but now never will.
Where did it go, this knowledge? What obscure avenues did it flee down? What must it be like, having minds like these boy princes of knowledge? To be immediately and constantly fluent in science, literature, mathematics, technology. To correct Paxman with nary a shrug. It is a sight to behold – why else are so many viewers drawn year after year to a show where they know only a tiny portion of the answers? We are impressed by knowledge. And why shouldn’t we be? It's extremely impressive.
Given this, however, I wonder why we shy from it in our teaching. The only people I know to rival these televised student savants are old – grandparents and older parents of my generation, living testaments to an age where you were taught simply to remember some things. Shakespeare. Latin. Keats. Not analysed or empathised with, simply committed to memory, by rote - to use that newly dirty word. I suspect it is valuable beyond pub quizzes. We ought not to relax in the knowledge that we, our children and our grandchildren will always have Google.
