Sara S
10-02-2013, 07:36 AM
from delancyplace.com:
In today's selection -- in The Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley puts forward the
case that high school sports may share part of the blame for declining U.S. academic
performance:
"Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the
world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with
fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop
to consider.
"One element of our education system consistently surprises them: 'Sports are a
big deal here,' says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family
in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in
18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling. Its campus
has lush grass fields, six tennis courts, and an athletic Hall of Fame. 'They have
days when teams dress up in Hawaiian clothes or pajamas just because -- 'We're the
soccer team!' ' Jenny says (To protect the privacy of Jenny and other students in
this story, only their first names are used.)
"By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind
Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny's
classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton
rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper,
it was usually for their academic accomplishments.
"Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else.
Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America's international
mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.)
The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched
poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends
to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?
"When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with
an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students
who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their
peers back home did. A majority of Americans who'd studied abroad agreed.
"Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids
spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced
Academics. In countries with more-holistic, less hard-driving education systems
than Korea's, like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local
towns --outside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure,
or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they?"
Author: Amanda Ripley
Title: "The Case Against High School Sports"
Publisher: The Atlantic
Date: October 2013
Pages: 74
In today's selection -- in The Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley puts forward the
case that high school sports may share part of the blame for declining U.S. academic
performance:
"Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the
world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with
fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop
to consider.
"One element of our education system consistently surprises them: 'Sports are a
big deal here,' says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family
in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in
18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling. Its campus
has lush grass fields, six tennis courts, and an athletic Hall of Fame. 'They have
days when teams dress up in Hawaiian clothes or pajamas just because -- 'We're the
soccer team!' ' Jenny says (To protect the privacy of Jenny and other students in
this story, only their first names are used.)
"By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind
Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny's
classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton
rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper,
it was usually for their academic accomplishments.
"Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else.
Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America's international
mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.)
The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched
poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends
to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?
"When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with
an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students
who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their
peers back home did. A majority of Americans who'd studied abroad agreed.
"Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids
spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced
Academics. In countries with more-holistic, less hard-driving education systems
than Korea's, like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local
towns --outside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure,
or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they?"
Author: Amanda Ripley
Title: "The Case Against High School Sports"
Publisher: The Atlantic
Date: October 2013
Pages: 74