One has to wonder whether the National Spelling Bee will soon be sent out to pasture. Any tradition is presumed problematic these days, and social justice groups seem to flex their muscle by canceling even the most innocent things. So how can an event that depends on the support of corporations last?
Already the National Spelling Bee is shrinking in a few ways. ESPN, which has carried the championship for 27 years, will no longer air it. Instead, the bee is airing on the proprietary channels of Scripps, the news organization that has hosted the bee for decades.
Local newspapers typically sponsored the local bees, but local newspapers are disappearing. Those outlets that do survive might not have the spare cash to subsidize a bee.
This year sees half the number of contestants compared to 2019. A big reason is a rule change (the “wild card” path to the National Spelling Bee has been foreclosed), but there are other causes of the downsizing. “Schools and sponsors have dropped out of the bee pipeline,” the Missourian newspaper reported. “Regions have been consolidated and the bee has fewer than half the spellers it had three years ago.”
Some of this is a lockdown hangover. The 2020 Bee never happened, and in 2021, the event was pared back and socially distanced.
Looking ahead, there’s a bigger reason to expect a decline: The years 2006 and 2007 were a mini-baby boom, and in 2008, the baby bust began, and almost every year since then, fewer babies have been born. That is, the baby bust is hitting the National Spelling Bee.
The oldest spellers this year were born just before the Great Recession and the beginning of the baby bust. Almost every year after 2008, fewer and fewer babies were born in America. That means every year from now on, America will have fewer middle schoolers — leading to fewer potential spelling bee contestants.
Then there’s the ever-present threat of cancel culture. Who would ever cancel a children’s spelling bee and why, you may ask? That’s the thing about cancel culture — it’s arbitrary and often totally unexpected. Peek at the commentary around the bee, and you can see critics searching for reasons to dislike it.
“How do you spell ‘inequality’ at the Bee?” asked the 2020 CNN headline atop an article that expressed relief at that year’s cancellation. The National Spelling Bee embodied “stark class inequalities perpetuated by children’s activities that call for major parental financial outlay.”
“Spelling bees are outdated rituals that prioritize memorization over everything else,” objected a writer at NBC News. “Memorization may be a useful skill,” the writer granted, but now that we have smartphones, autocorrect can save us.
