Joanne has
a great post today on why sports and academics are treated so differently by students and parents in our society. You'll want to read the whole thing, but here is my favorite part:
Robert Pondiscio, whose daughter was a competitive athlete, defends sports as the last remaining place where children are held accountable for their performance.
If you are of a certain age, it’s a fair bet that your parents held you—and you alone—accountable for your grades in school. Over the past several decades, we have eroded student accountability, assigning it as a matter of public policy to schools and teachers.
In competitive sports, Pondiscio writes, “You show up, work hard and perform, or else you sit.”
In school, we create the illusion of success when it’s not entirely warranted, particularly when it serves adult interests to be less than candid with kids about where they actually stand (emphasis mine--Darren). The stopwatch and the scoreboard are the most honest report cards some kids will ever get.
My belief: it's easier to believe that your kid can excel athletically than academically. It's easier, and more fun for everyone, to push the athletics. If academics is hard, it's the
teacher's fault. That view is echoed in one of the comments on the above post:
Sports and the fine/performing arts are honest and the academic side of
school is not. Sports and the arts know, and freely acknowledge, that
people differ widely in talent and motivation; effort, self-control,
persistence, the ability to delay gratification etc. Plenty of talented
people fail to reach the level their talent could reach, because they
are unwilling to put in the effort, and no amount of effort can reach
beyond the level of their talent. Schools do the opposite and pretend
that neither academic talent (IQ, g) nor intrinsic motivation matters.
Staff can improve motivation, to a point, in those willing to accept
instruction, but the idea that “all” can reach a meaningful academic
proficiency level beyond the basic is a fantasy.
Yeah, what she said.
1 comment:
Too many parents have been sold a bill of goods by AAU type coaches who need to stock their teams with players to make money for themselves. As a high school coach for almost 40 years, I've seen how the times have changed. The odds of receiving an athletic scholarship are huge. And in some sports our little Johnny and Mary are competing on a global scale for scholarships. It's a tough sell to convince athletes and their parents that there is a LOT more academic scholarship money out there than athletic scholarship money. Year round specialization and huge investments of money in all kinds of training make it imperative that parents get a return on their investment by little Johnny getting the scholarship he has been groomed for regardless of his lack of talent.
Now they expect the same rewards in the classroom. If little Johnny is scholarship material on the athletic field (according to Dad), then the lowering of standards must occur in the classroom because little Johnny needs to academically qualify for that athletic scholarship that he will undoubtedly receive.
Afterall, everyone is equal, right?
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