Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports

theatlantic.com

13 pointspseudolus13 comments

These damn rich people and their... uhhh... ability to provide good experiences for their kids.

What an outrage! Some kids don't get good experiences and therefore no one should.

Public education should divorce intermural sports from scholastics.

Among many other reasons, as a (USA) taxpayer, I don't understand why society is subsidizing professional sports by running their farm system.

The challenge of equal opportunity (fairness) is better met thru more and better scholastics.

Ideally, the point of school is to help children figure out how to contribute to society once they are no longer in school. Some children do this by being good at sports. Yeah, that sounds weird, but a lot of people make their living through sports or sport-related fields.

Do you think we should end the art and music "farm system" too?

I oppose funding intermural sports. I'm still (strongly) in favor of intramural sports. If someone (or their parents) imagines they are a professional prospect, I favor the club system, like Europe has for soccer.

Thinking about it a bit more, I'm okay with amateur intermural sports. Like wrestling, swimming, track & field. So while I don't know exactly where to draw the line, I'm a hard no on commercialized sports like American gladiator style football, fast pitch baseball, basketball.

Yes, ideally, we should have magnet schools for STEM, humanities, fine arts, performing arts, agrigulture, voc tech, etc. The goal is equal opportunity, helping kids find their niche, not equal outcomes.

It’s e-sports. There’s teamwork, your physical condition matters a lot. They’re competitive. They’re social. They can train a lot of skills that could be as useful in life as being able to outrun the competition (think analyzing the best build for your character with a spreadsheet, or flying a war drone).

Sure sure, income inequality is a growing problem, and perhaps the cause of the decline in high school athletics, but really, people are just playing more e-sports.

There are leagues. You don’t need a lot of money to fund trips and infrastructure.

One thing to note - the author did not provide true causation. His theory that HS sports are no longer providing outlets for low income families isn't tightly bound to the outcomes seen. There's a lot of correlation and not a lot of causation.

Maybe a shift from sports to actual fitness and health would be a good start. But we must retain an element of teamwork. Maybe the issue is the old design of current popular sports. A newer one targeted to general fitness over specific fitness may help ease the meritocracy that will evolve as it does in all human systems over time. I think some amount of merit-based fitness is good, but when merit is the only qualifier, the motivations get weird fast. College sports is good exmple of that.

What is a sport that democratizes fitness? Can anyone think up one? Seems there are many ways to make this better.

What's surprising about this?

You needed resources to play, even the slight advantage like being taller is correlated to wealth.

Many prefer to watch YouTube video, because they've no means to do it themselves and many are happy just watching.

It's similar to how in apes we see alpha having sex while rest only get to watch.

I'd like to think, we humans can mold our societies based on ideals such as fairness, equality of opportunity etc... even if these don't exist in nature.

"Kids from homes earning more than $100,000 are now twice as likely to play a team sport at least once a day as kids from families earning less than $25,000."

Sounds like parents that don't have their life together aren't encouraging their kids to challenge and better themselves through sport. No surprise there.

There's some truth to this, but there's also truth in that low-income homes often use (free) school sports as a sort of after school day care for their kids. I know this to be true because I experienced it first hand.

Could it be that better mental health (whatever the cause of that might be) causes both higher income and more physical activity?

First off, the upper middle class has heard, a lot, that it is well to encourage children to play sports. They have heard that private middle schools and high schools look favorably on it, they've heard that selective colleges want well-rounded kids. So, willy-nilly the kids strap on shin guards in the fall and pick up bats in the spring.

Second, apart from a bit of intramural sports, I never really played an organized sport. But I was out playing driveway basketball or touch football on lawns an awful lot. No, it may not have been once a day, but it was frequent. And the kids of the less well off may be down at the playground a great deal shooting hoops or playing soccer.

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