US schools today (junior high, high school, college) do the best job on earth of producing the highest-possible quality athletes and sports teams. They do an increasingly lousy job producing writers, engineers, scientists, historians, etc. Here's an article about a prospective college basketball player whose eligability requires him to enroll in a fake academic program that will confer to him an academically meaningless "high school diploma". Why does this guy's athletic ambitions have any academic requirement? It's preposterous and harmful to all involved. The only beneficiaries: Sports fans. In order to maximize the happiness of high school and college sports fans, academics at high schools and colleges suffer. So do the academic achievements of people who persue careers in sports that have scholastic linkages: basketball, football, baseball, and track.
Notice that the greater the sports-academic linkage (which equates with the size of the school sports fan base), the worse academically the sports participants perform, on average. Compare the average academic qualifications of those participants to those in sports with zero academic linkages: golf, tennis, gymnastics, swimming, ice skating, skiing, etc.
Clearly, if you care more about the academic performance of schools and students than you do having schools produce championship sports teams and athletes, you must support removing inter-school sports competitions from schools.
2006-02-28
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