Fried the brilliant moron asks whether teachers should be held accountable for the subsequent dim-wittedness of their students:

“I think it is the responsibility of teachers, and other educators, to evaluate students based on intelligence and competency rather than on regurgitation of textbook mumbo-jumbo. Scientists have taught monkeys, and dolphins, to remember things like sounds, shapes, and words. I think humans, even young ones, should be held to a standard a tad higher.”

True, there is a lot to be said for this country’s state of education as well. It’s not so much as a dumbing down, but perhaps a tendency to be more lax, to allow witticisms and the ability to bluff pass as I sign of intelligence. We only need to look at the kind of game show contestants crowding our television sets. You can be sure that each of those contestants had been in school at one point in their lives, and most of them with college degrees. But given questions that require, in the very least, knowledge of trivia and common sense, they all seem to be newly lobotomized.

It can be argued that game shows flourish for fun and the possibility of earning a quick buck, and I don’t think such questions as “discuss and differentiate the quantity theory of insanity as culled from the text of Will Self and Hedda Gabbler” would figure in prime time television. We may complain and wrinkle our noses at all the game shows, the extra sudsy soap operas, dubbed or otherwise, and proclaim all of these as unspeakably jologs. It is. They are made that way because the target market is specifically and undeniably masa.

Jologs is not an invention or a byword but a demographic: It is the product of research, the countless studies and focus group discussions involving that specific audience. No matter how baduy we may think those shows are, as long as a large number of people watch them with zest, and discuss the plot points on the jeepney or in the MRT, their existence will be assured. The advertisers will continue to sell their products to us in between the gaps, just when you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see who gets voted out, slapped or raised from the dead.

Elsewhere in jologs land: Mark plays with his Jolina dolls and provides us a backstage view of a formerly leather clad Kris Aquino.