I’ve got a piece up on The Daily Beast today about whether a National Spelling Bee that’s broadcast in prime-time on network television is a good thing.

I’m sure it’ll generate a comment or two that I’m dissing the Bee itself. I’m not. The Bee is awesome. It shows off kids at their smartest. It fosters a love of language. It makes people — competitors and viewers — appreciate the breadth and depth of English. It teaches kids to focus, study and perform under pressure. And, not insiginifcantly, it makes them realize that life is a crapshoot: Sometimes you get a word you already know, sometimes you don’t.

My beef with the Bee is the move to prime time. I like watching kids spell on TV as much as the next logophile, but in my mind the issue is whether the Bee needs to be on ABC with spellers spelling until the ratings-friendly time of 10 p.m.  What’s best for the competitors? That, to me, is the only question worth asking.

Kids are incredibly resilient, so blowing a word in front of an audience of millions might not look like a big deal. But it could be. So Just as it’s legitimate to ask whether the Little League World Series needs to be on broadcast TV, it’s fair to ask the same about the Bee. ”Adolescent sports aren’t meant to be entertainment for adults,” Boston sports psychologist Richard Ginsburg says in my friend Mark Hyman’s new book, Until It Hurts, about America’s unhealthy obsession with youth sports.

In 2007 and 2008, I wrote the script and was color commentator for ESPN’s coverage of the National School Scrabble Championship. It was great fun. I think the shows turned out well, we exposed a few hundred thousand viewers to Scrabble and smart kids, and most of the competitors seemed to like the attention.

ESPN dropped out this year and, while I was disappointed, I was also a bit relieved. For starters, I could focus exclusively on the kids I’d brought to the event and didn’t have to worry about making a show. (I started a Scrabble club at my daughter’s Washington, D.C., elementary school last year; four of my players joined the 200-player national championship in April, and I talked about it on NPR.) While most of the players thought having ESPN around was pretty cool — and were happy to do whatever the producers asked of them — not all were entirely comfortable. This year felt saner — because it was exlusively about the competition, the kids.

And that’s the dilemma with televising events like the Bee or Scrabble or Little League. Is the absolute virtue of exposing couch-bound, brain-locked Americans to two hours of kids being smart trumped by the distraction and the glitz and added pressure? Do events lose sight of their purpose when the cameras start rolling?