In 1729, Jonathan Swift penned his notorious "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public," to mock English complaints about the "burden" of the Irish people on the British Empire. His so-called modest solution? Encourage parents to eat their young. No more overpopulation, no more hunger, and no more rebellion.
I have another modest proposal, probably almost as outrageous and perhaps insulting to some people, but actually feasible and perhaps even moral.
We should smash the corrupting influence of athletics in our high schools, colleges and universities. Like students in the rest of the world, Americans should go to school for no other purpose than to learn.
I teach at a selective liberal arts college that produces dozens of future doctors, lawyers, and scientists every year. Most of our students are serious, with good minds, and they want to work hard. But it is no secret to the faculty that many of them are ill-prepared. A large percentage write poorly, with a weak grasp of basic grammar. They know little about the world, usually returning from their study-abroad semesters profoundly shocked by their new perspectives. They are steeped in unexamined nostrums, whether about American's special, sanctified role in history, or the absolute authority of laissez-faire economics. They don't read newspapers.
But these are among our best young people! My college's median SAT score for this year's entering class is over 1300. If a significant number of these students require catch-up training in how to write properly and think critically, how will the vast majority of less-fortunate students fare? There is little question that the average American high school graduate is poorly skilled, a victim of social promotion, overworked and undertrained teachers, politicized state testing norms, and, I strongly suspect, parents who insist on feel-good classes and easy grades. So we fall farther behind the world each year, as any American businessperson with overseas experience will confirm.
There is nothing inherently bad, and much good, about team sports. They teach mental and physical discipline, the virtues of camaraderie and the common good. They are a form of aesthetic play, like music or theater. But there is no evident connection between playing sports and study, and conflating the two, as we have done on a massive scale, is just plain bad for institutions of learning. No one ever asked whether Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, or Jane Addams did or did not "make the team." Yet in the U.S., at every level of K-12 and higher education, we provide vast resources, and assign great importance, to whether or not a particular young man or woman can or cannot throw a ball, run or swim fast, and so on. School pride and local culture revolve around team performance, as do alumni donations and state funding.
Of course, there's much more wrong in our schools than just the enormously oversized importance assigned to athletics: a culture of entitlement, an arrogant anti-intellectualism that scorns scholarship, structural poverty with no end in sight, our system of discriminatory funding based on property taxes, the affirmative action program for well-off kids whom we politely dub "legacies." A political party that represented all of my views would begin dealing with these much larger problems -- but that's not about to happen, and we need to start somewhere.
The rapidly spreading International Baccalaureate (I.B.) option is an indicator of what it would look like if we re-dedicated our high schools to learning so that our students were ready for competitive work at the college level. Young men and women in I.B. programs are not likely to start on any football or basketball team I can imagine -- they're too busy studying serious historical problems, mastering calculus, working in the lab, or (that scariest prospect for most Americans) learning to speak a foreign language competently.
For me, it's simple: my students who are varsity athletes must allocate twenty-five hours a week of intensive physical effort to their sport -- and this is at a Division Three school where athletics are formally a second-tier activity; Division One universities should be dubbed "semi-professional athletic training facilities," for those students who are the beneficiaries of that oxymoron, the "athletic scholarship." Think about popular movies like Jerry Maguire or The Blind Side -- there's no pretense that the physically gifted young black men around whom their plots revolve learn anything in college other than how to tackle, or leap in the air to catch a pass.
If U.S. students performed well, the question would be moot. But they don't. Outside of the top tier, whose parents are drawn almost entirely from the upper-middle and professional classes, they perform very badly. And yet, black, white, or Latino, in every school district, they are seduced by the possibility that some boy with fast hands or feet will be "scouted" and ascend to a stratosphere of fame and money.
American society is profoundly unequal, given how much wealth we actually possess and could devote to education. Better we adopt the European version of a stratified society, in which you rise through the combination of intellectual capacity and hard work. Rather than offering the poor and working classes a fantasy of individual superstardom, we should radically increase the rigor -- and thus the amount of time required -- in K-12 education. Of course, that means more and better teachers, and more money for them, but I suspect we cannot make any of those reforms, until we achieve a national consensus on the purpose of schooling itself. If we really believe in education, as the anchor of a coherent, hardworking, meritocratic but democratic society -- the vision of all of our great nineteenth century leaders, Lincoln above all -- then it's time get rid of everything that gets in the way, and one major obstacle is the central role of team sports.
As for the author's claim that IB students don't have time for athletics, that's patently false. I graduated with a full IB diploma and played a varsity sport; the three co-valedictorians of my high school class, all IB students, each played at least one and more commonly two varsity sports. Athletic achievement and academic success aren't mutually exclusive. If you want to fix American education, especially at the K-12 level, the answer lies in paying teachers a more reasonable salary and placing a greater emphasis and value on learning at the societal level. Anti-intellectualism is symptomatic of this larger issue, not a product of an overemphasis on athletics.
The author's claim that IB is "rapidly spreading" is false. The 2009 ARRA contained over $10Billion for Title I schools which implemented "innovative programs" and many Superintendents have attempted to implement IB in their districts using this "free" money". But as we all know, that money isn't "free", it's part of our $15 Trillion debt and once that money runs out, the local taxpayers will get hit with the IB taxbills.
IB costs on average $200,000 per year, per site (not including teacher salaries with the exception of the mandatory IB Coordinator position). IB Standard Level (SL) exams are not recognized for college-credit by MOST U.S. universities whereas AP is recognized for credit by almost every university.
American public schools should be apolitical - neither right nor left. IB's stated goal is to create "global citizens". American students don't need a Swiss NGO of UNESCO to learn a foreign language or calculus. Promoting this outdated, overly-expensive educational scam is irresponsible in these dire economic times.
www.truthaboutib.com
Is sports overemphasized? Yes. Does that, alone, make sports bad? No. Face facts there are many successful doctors, lawyers, and professors who played sports at some of the football and basketball factories.
While an op-ed piece is about opinion, it should recognize in some way that the facts are not completely one-sided.
Such a simple, straightforward, idea. The problem lies with the media and the population at_large that drives their programming decisions. The slackjawed maroons who live for a steady diet of sports are the same folks who could care less about academics. These people demand that media provide them with their 'low-calorie diet' of sports. Not one newspaper in America has an "Academics" section. But, they all have a sports section. The claim that, because of the athletics programs and its attendant coverage, boosters give generously to their alma_maters is a flawed notion. Most schools lose money on their athletic programs and for those rare few schools where athletics programs run in the black, the money that comes in gets spent by that department, not the engineering school.
There should be maybe forty big name schools that have athletic programs. Let them be the training ground for the entertainers we call athletes. The other schools should do what they are supposed to do best, educate. That valuable scholarship money is wasted on these athletes and not on the best and the brightest is criminal. But, it would mean the media would have to be courageous and stop filling their schedules with tons of kids getting concussions each weekend. Based on their inability to be courageous in their straight news reporting, this simply isn't going to happen.
Newspapers print was people will buy... A college could have a athletic program if they want...
Secondly,,how can you have a good mind if you write poorly and aren't skilled? Third,newspapers are corporate like our TV media. There aren't that many good newspapers anymore,and it's sad.
School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days.
'Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick.
You were my queen in calico,
I was your bashful barefoot beau,
And you wrote on my slate,
'I love you, Joe,'
When we were a couple of kids.