It's fascinating to observe that you, JvL, and most of the commenters here, appear to take for granted that every youngster should adopt a sport or sports as their most important extracurricular activity. The real cost of anything, of course, is the opportunity cost--what is given up that one could have done instead. And as a long-time t…
It's fascinating to observe that you, JvL, and most of the commenters here, appear to take for granted that every youngster should adopt a sport or sports as their most important extracurricular activity. The real cost of anything, of course, is the opportunity cost--what is given up that one could have done instead. And as a long-time teacher and sponsor of alternative activities (geography club, film club, history club, world affairs club, Model UN, Fridays for Future) I can tell you that what ends up getting deprived of oxygen is intellectual, social, civic and artistic pursuits. Quite simply, most young Americans have no time left in their day to develop these at all, or in any case, nearly as seriously as they do their sport, although of course some pretend to do so for college application purposes. Sports dominate students' lives and they dominate schools, which are locked into annual and daily schedules determined rigidly by the sports practice and competition schedules decided by their athletic conference organization. The "after-school clubs" that some of us remember from our adolescence must try to squeeze into hurried lunch periods, or weekend meetings--and predictably, they find it hard to develop substantive activities, and to compete with sports for adherents. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Only in the US are sports a school activity (and in many communities, the main school activity that parents and students care about). In other countries, such as Germany, where we now live, young people develop their sports interests in a network of external sports clubs, and youths are much freer to define and develop their personal identities in many interesting ways.
Great point. I played high school sports and band and still had plenty of time for other clubs and nerdy pursuits, but I could certainly see how the elite sports escalation could suck up more time than that. Still, there's a limit to how many hours a week you can train the body without breaking it, leaving time for other things.
Music might be the only thing that's even within a quantum level of the same intensity as sports, for a few kids. One Seattle high school used to have an orchestra and jazz band that was taken as seriously as sports, by quite a few of the participants (e.g. high schooler with a $10,000 flute) but the district has largely dismantled advanced learning which also has degraded the feed of students into that program. Basically the opposite of what's happening in sports.
It's fascinating to observe that you, JvL, and most of the commenters here, appear to take for granted that every youngster should adopt a sport or sports as their most important extracurricular activity. The real cost of anything, of course, is the opportunity cost--what is given up that one could have done instead. And as a long-time teacher and sponsor of alternative activities (geography club, film club, history club, world affairs club, Model UN, Fridays for Future) I can tell you that what ends up getting deprived of oxygen is intellectual, social, civic and artistic pursuits. Quite simply, most young Americans have no time left in their day to develop these at all, or in any case, nearly as seriously as they do their sport, although of course some pretend to do so for college application purposes. Sports dominate students' lives and they dominate schools, which are locked into annual and daily schedules determined rigidly by the sports practice and competition schedules decided by their athletic conference organization. The "after-school clubs" that some of us remember from our adolescence must try to squeeze into hurried lunch periods, or weekend meetings--and predictably, they find it hard to develop substantive activities, and to compete with sports for adherents. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Only in the US are sports a school activity (and in many communities, the main school activity that parents and students care about). In other countries, such as Germany, where we now live, young people develop their sports interests in a network of external sports clubs, and youths are much freer to define and develop their personal identities in many interesting ways.
Great point. I played high school sports and band and still had plenty of time for other clubs and nerdy pursuits, but I could certainly see how the elite sports escalation could suck up more time than that. Still, there's a limit to how many hours a week you can train the body without breaking it, leaving time for other things.
Music might be the only thing that's even within a quantum level of the same intensity as sports, for a few kids. One Seattle high school used to have an orchestra and jazz band that was taken as seriously as sports, by quite a few of the participants (e.g. high schooler with a $10,000 flute) but the district has largely dismantled advanced learning which also has degraded the feed of students into that program. Basically the opposite of what's happening in sports.
Yeah, and every time they cut the budget music is the fist thing to go. While more and more money goes to sports.