We are in the midst of football everywhere – the NFL, the NCAA – Idaho, WSU – it is sport madness at its best and its worst. In the US sport is a part of the competitive experience in public school education as well as in the college and university setting. In Europe, such is not the case. Sport/athletics are outside of the school experience. There are no school sports. The argument against school athletics is that it is not a part of the academic experience…in fact it is not academic. There is also a writer in the US by the name of Alfie Kohn who in his work, No Contest, has argued that sport and athletics should be removed from the school experience because it is exclusionary, meaning that not everyone gets to participate and only a select free receive the rewards. At the same time, the love affair with sports and competition starts young, there is a national basketball competition for second graders through the AAU. Below find also a response by one of your peers. The writer had returned from 4 and 1/2 yrs active duty army, 2 tours in Iraq, came to college, SGT in the Army Reserve, works as a juvenile probation officer and still graduated college in the time frame of 3 years. After you read his response, jump into the debate either argue for school sports or against school sports. I look forward to your responses.
School First
I am going to go against the rest of the class and argue against school sports. I personally played school sports from kindergarten to my senior year of high school, my kids will play school sports, and I will make sure my nephews all play school sports. So why would I argue against school sports? I am going to argue against school sports because no one else did and also because I want to express some of the wrong I feel school sports present to their kids. I spent 1 year and 4 months in Germany before the war in Iraq started. In 2001 and 2002 I was an eighteen – nineteen year old kid who came into the military being a high school hero. I was a captain on the football team and a four year varsity and state place wrestler. I thought everyone knew who I was and that all would continue to worship the ground I walked on, as many of my high school peers did. I couldn’t be more wrong. Sport did not teach me about the real world, people don’t care who you are or where you come from especially in the military. I was a private, that was it, they didn’t care that I lead my team in tackles 2 years straight or that I won over 100 career wrestling matches. They would have preferred that I was smarter with engines and bi lingual. Sport didn’t teach me anything about mechanics or languages, the truth of the matter is that every girl I met in Germany spoke English. I would brag about my high school days and they would laugh, because I thought it was so cool and they were just thinking “man I wish he spoke German, who cares about American football?” Enough said right. Nope, they (Germans) are all smarter because they go to school for 15 years and they play soccer in their spare time. They all take English and many know Russian, French and Italian. It is just part of their culture, like sport is ours education is theirs.
Another reason I think sport is not a great idea is because all I want to do in life is win, now before I bad mouth winning I would like to say that I think winning is important, if one is to be successful in life they have to work harder than the competition and I believe that to my bones, but this doesn’tgo for every single detail in life. I am now tainted by winning, it poisons me and I know it. Thank you high school sport. Also, what about school in general. How many times do kids change schools in order to play for a “winning” program, or how many times does a kid pass class strictly because he is the star athlete? I know I passed math with an “A” and I didn’t lift a pencil in the class, oh our Defensive Back coach was our teacher. I remember him drawing up defensive plays for me personally, on the white board during class hours, I thought it was cool at the time, but how is that fair to other students? It is not. Powell writes in his book that only “47 % of black division I football players graduated compared to 63 % of white teammates in 2005” (Powell, 2008, pp 77). I find that number to be low on both ends. I feel that people should be in college to get an education first, sports second.
I like how Doc Stoll presented the “whitening” of sport in the future. In this discussion we learned that professional teams are drafting white European and even white American players at a higher rate because “they go to class and stay out of trouble”. In America many of the college athletes believe they will go pro and that mentality has the education part of college taking a back seat to sports. The sad truth is many are black athletes. Many of these African American athletes could not attend college if it wasn’t because of an academic scholarship; all athletes need to realize this and get their degree for the future. I realize that people will say that sport enhances character and gets people ready for the “real world”, but I believe that this is not a true statement; education is the way to go, knowledge is key. Winning a 3A state championship is not going to make you successful in life, being bi lingual with a doctorate in engineering will. It seems like such an easy choice to make, education prevails. I started this paper saying my kids will play all sports in high school, I still feel the same. Sport has ruined my generation and in return our youth. I pray for the type of children who are blessed with athletic ability and classroom smarts. The American dream.
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