He championed the cause of the disqualified sports team with a profile no one had ever seen him take for any academic program of the school district. These are examples of the many times school administrators observe their communities lose perspective, or when school administrators themselves lose perspective, about the proper role of interscholastic athletics in the life of schools. I wish communit ies, school boards and administrators would get as worked up about academic matters as athletics. This ideal runs counter to some of the trendy efforts to reform public education today. But the ideal is consistent with the historical role of education in America, which is to promote social understanding and democratic participation.
School sports draw together students of diverse backgrounds to compete with and against one another.
Focusing on one sport year-round to the exclusion of most everything else. While misguided, the worry of these parents and the important role they think school sports have in the success and happiness of their children reinforces the near obsessive importance of sports in society today, and thus in schools today. But if we drop our guard, national championships will come to school sports and drive interscholastic athletics as far from the mission of schools as intercollegiate athletics have become from the mission of most major colleges and universities. As students specialize, as schools trim squad sizes and sub-varsity competition, as special interest groups fund their teams to do grander things, educational athletics wander from the purpose of education in America. Rather than being a melting pot fo r learning to work with others, school sports become programs for the privileged few to strut their stuff.