I think the principal would get called out on that more today. It just takes a few people to squeal it on the web and people are less tolerant of it. But it all depends upon the school and much they hold sports dear.
Well actually sports ARE largely funded outside the school budget thru things like booster clubs, fundraisers, fees, and selling tickets and merchandise. Even my sons HS theater department received only a small portion of the budget from the school.
So again, I see this as a slow movement to take sports out of schools and make them private.
Also, children should not be encouraged by officials to regard kids from other schools as rivals or enemies to be opposed or defeated as a group. Tribalism may be a human instinct, but it’s one that should be discouraged by societal institutions, not encouraged. So, to the extent that kids from different schools play together, sides shouldn’t be drawn up on lines that support “othering” of one’s fellow human beings.
Where would this be?
At said small Texas high school, the booster club paid for some extras, but the coaches’ salaries, the bus that drove the team to games, the maintenance on the football field (and the practice field), and so forth all came out of the school budget.
Yes, salaries are paid by the school. I dont know about the bus, where we lived the teams paid for those or it came from the activity fee budget. That football field is also probably used by several other teams that pay a fee.
Every sport I ever played, the players on the other team were acknowledged and respected, and there were rituals like going down the line and shaking everyone’s hand on the other team after the game. And I’m talking about the heart of the Midwest, not some commune in California or something. At no point did I ever observe “tribalism.” If anything, sports take a bunch of guys from widely varied backgrounds and economic classes, and bring them together.
I experience that one more than once myself - actually with underage drinking and drugs, which should get you suspended from the team or activities. But only did for certain kids, other kids were allowed to continue. And it was supposed to feed into whether the kid was offered a varsity role next year, since a kid who is suspended isn’t a good bet - but if you are never suspended for it…
(And as an aside - anyone want to guess what color the kids were who got a pass - and which color the kids were who were suspended and then didn’t get a spot on the team the next year?)
Not in my small town. The new Football field and all the supporting construction for it were a sizable chunk of the school remodeling/renovation referendum. All funded with local property tax money.
Learning the rules of sports is a big part of learning how to play them. Being taught how to play them - technique, strategy, and so on - enhances one’s enjoyment of them.
Interesting. Here, it wasn’t all that unusual to see news stories about students from rival schools getting into fistfights over the rivalry.
Inventing and shifting the rules of games, and working out the rules among small groups of people actually playing them, enhances many people’s enjoyment of them; and may teach technique and strategy better than having fixed rules handed down from on high by adults.
There’s nothing important about the rules or strategies of any specific sport. If your purpose is to encourage kids to engage in physical activity, it matters zero whether they get good at any particular game. Indeed, it’s better for their development to learn to make up their own rules as they go.
Yeah, two minutes of lip service to “sportsmanship” after spending an entire lifetime being taught to view fellow human beings as opponents simply for being students at a different school. Never impressed me.
Not in my large urban district, either.
Ypu also have to include the cost of the administration’s manpower. Principals and such spend a LOT of time on athletic programs, supporting coaches, dealing with problems, talking to parents. It’s a real cost.
This doesn’t make any sense. Unstructured play is an important part of a kid’s development, but learning to play sports - for which you have to learn the rules so that you’re playing basically the same sport as other people - is also important. It adds to a person’s enjoyment of life to know how to play sports; I know few people who DON’T get lots out of at least one sport, and you cannot just make up your own rules if you want to play with other people when they all understand a certain ruleset. I don’t understand why you’d think a person shouldn’t do both.
They can learn the rule set when someone who is playing with them teaches it to them—friends, relatives, pickup games. Or if they choose to join a private league. There’s no good policy reason for a school curriculum or administrators or teachers/coaches to be involved. And there’s no reason for official institutions to choose what games or rule sets are worth learning or dedicating public resources to. People can learn games on their own from the people they encounter in daily life.
True.
But learning – and possibly helping to work out – the rules of the particular people you’re playing with is a different thing from learning These Are The Rules According To The One And Only Rulebook.
We’ve already got way too many people believing There’s Only One Right Way To Do Things.
So did mine; every social studies teacher was also a coach (& also male). Social studies was my favorite subject, but I has warned against becoming a social studies teacher they them because I didn’t like sports. A (female) guidance counselor actually advised students that it was very difficult for males to get teaching jobs unless they could also coach a sport. The PE teachers were also all coaches; which actually makes sense, but the impression I get from the boys’ PE teachers was that coaching was their main job and they resented having to teach PE.
I was also in the orchestra and that’s pretty much how we viewed all other schools when we were in competition with them. The same was true of debate or Quiz Bowl. The problem you’re describing is endemic to competition not sports. And kids need to learn how to compete.
At my old high school PE class WAS basically practice time for whatever sport was on at that time like basketball.
Heck most of the time all the PE teacher/coach did was toss out a basketball and tell us to pick teams and play.
Now granted, that was then. I’ve heard thats changed alot.
Well, yes, they probably do; if only in self-defense.
What they don’t need to learn is that competition is more important than cooperation; or that the only important reason to do something is so that you can win at it.