
Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports - pseudolus
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/meritocracy-killing-high-school-sports/597121/
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anm89
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.

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specialist
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.

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Kneecaps07
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?

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specialist
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.

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pesmhey
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.

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brodouevencode
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.

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whenchamenia
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.

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gingabriska
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.

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strikelaserclaw
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.

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RocketSyntax
"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.

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brodouevencode
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.

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perl4ever
Could it be that better mental health (whatever the cause of that might be)
causes both higher income and more physical activity?

