BBC NEWS South Asia Indians top US spelling contests: "Over the years many children of South Asian origin have left their mark at the spelling event, but why do they dominate it?"
The Spelling Bee is a curiously American phenom. I have always suspected that the modern popularity of the event is because of immigrants who place a high value on learning, as opposed to, say, arts and sports. So, while some kids might show off their ballet moves, here are a few competing with words. Spellbound followed one such case, remember?
This is what Tunku Varadarajan suggested, back in 2005: "Success at letters is the sweetest sort of success, the achievement nonpareil.
For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation.
But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization--the result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a moral virtue, and certainly as a caste "signifier," to use a clumsy anthropological term.)
For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation.
But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization--the result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a moral virtue, and certainly as a caste "signifier," to use a clumsy anthropological term.)
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