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  3. Sports and Education Sports Are a Kind of Education For many young people in my part of the world (suburban America), th

Sports and Education Sports Are a Kind of Education For many young people in my part of the world (suburban America), th

admin2009-04-23  70
问题                                         Sports and Education
    Sports Are a Kind of Education
    For many young people in my part of the world (suburban America), the first brush with organized athletics comes on a Saturday morning in early spring. The weather is getting warmer and the school year’s end is imminent, and moms, sensing the approach of summer vacation and too much free time, pile us into the backs of minivans and drive us to our town’s local sports and recreation center. In my hometown, Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, kids converge each year on the EHT Youth Organ Building, a cinderblock shack in the middle of a handful of baseball and football fields. There lines are waited in, forma filled out, birth certificates examined and photocopied, health insurance waivers furnished and signed. At the end of the morning, kids are signed up for little-league baseball and an instant summer of activities has been created. Then it’s time to go to Burger King.
    For parents seeking productive ways to occupy their children’s time, summer sports leagues offer a convenient and time tested outlet for overabundant energy. In my case that meant baseball. America’s pastime: nine weeks of pitched fastballs and sore elbows, grounders up the, middle, digging it out to first base. Shagging flies in the outfield and swatting mosquitoes in the infield. Then, after six innings, back to Burger King.
    A couple of weeks after the signups at the cinderblock shack, we kids would be rounded up into teams and coached in the fundamentals of pitching, catching, hitting, and running bases. We’d be supplied with color-coded jerseys and mesh baseball caps, and then we would play a season’s worth of games against one another. Playoffs would be held and champions crowned. At the end of the season an ail-star team of the league’s best players would be assembled to play against the best teams from neighboring towns.
    Back and forth across the country this system repeats itself from town to town and sport to sport with little variation. Some leagues have storied pasts: baseball’s Little League or football’s Pop Warner League. Some are newer. In cities it is often the Policemen’s Benevolent Association or the YMCA that assumes the sponsorship role. Always, though, there is the underlying idea that organized sport is a valuable and productive use of a young person’s time. Sports, in short, are a kind of education, teaching important life .skills that can’t be learned in school.
    Ideas about the educational value of sports vary widely. For some, sports foster the social development of young people, teaching kids how to interact with their peers outside the classroom. Sports teach kids what it means to compote—how to cope with losing, how to respond gracefully to success. Sports are about teamwork, how to work together toward a common goal. Sometimes they’re about developing a sense of self-esteem. Sometimes they’re simply about finding a healthy way to tire hyperactive kids out so they’ll sit still in class or get to bed at a reasonable hour. Some bolder advocates claim that their games build character.
    Given the prevailing educational undercurrent, it’s no surprise that many kids’ second brush with organized athletics takes place in a school. Junior highs and highs schools sponsor their own sports programs and field teams of football, basketball. soccer and tennis players. There the educational theme is given a more direct and tangible form as squads of student-athletes travel around the state representing their schools on the field, court or diamond. Yet here, strangely enough, is where a bit of the educational component begins to niter. High school teams are necessarily more selective than their youth league predecessors. Tryouts are held and less promising players are cut. Coaches receive salaries, and there is an expectation that the teams they shape will win. In sum, there is a slight change in emphasis away from education and toward out right competition.
    Competitive Sports Build Character
    Education is an important theme in youth athletics in the US. Young kids, energetic, rambunctious, cooped up in class, yearn for the relative freedom of the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond. They long to kick and throw things and tackle each other, and the fields of organized play offer a place in which to act out these impulses, Kids are basically encouraged, after all, to beat each other up on the football field. Yet for all the chaos, adult guidance and supervision are never far off, and time spent on the athletic fields is meant to be productive. Conscientious coaches seek to impart lessons in teamwork, self-sacrifice, competition, gracious winning and losing. Teachers at least want their’ pupils worn out so they’ll sit still in reading class.
    By the time children start competing for spots on junior high soccer teams or tennis squads, the kid gloves have come off to some extent. The athletic fields become less a place to learn about soft values like teamwork than about hard self discipline and competition. Competitiveness, after all, is prized highly by Americans, perhaps more so than by other peoples. For a child, being cut from the hockey team or denied a spot on the swimming is a grave disappointment and perhaps an opportunity for emotional or spiritual growth.
    High school basketball or football teams are places where the ethos of competition is given still stronger emphasis. Al though high school coaches still consider themselves educators, the sports they oversee are not simple extensions of the classroom. They are important social institutions, for football games bring people together, in much of the US they are e vents where young people and their elders mingle and see how the community is evolving.
    For the best players, the progression from little league to junior high to high school leads to a scholarship at a big name college and maybe, one day, a shot at the pros. College athletes are ostensibly student-athletes an ideal that suggests a balance between the intellectual rigors of the university and the physical rigors of the playing field. The reality is skewed, heavily in favor of athletics. One would be hard-pressed to show that major US college sports are about education. Coaches require far too much of players’ time to be truly concerned with anything other than performance in sport. Too of ten, the players they recruit seem to care little about school themselves.
    This was not always the case. Universities—Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Yale—were the birthplaces of American football and baseball; education—the formation of "character"—was an important part of what those coaches and players thought they were achieving. In 1913, when football was almost outlawed in the US, the game’s most prominent figures traveled to Washington and argued successfully that football was an essential part of the campus experience and that the nation would be robbed of its boldest young men, its best potential leaders, if the game were banned.
    The idea that competitive sports build character, a Western tradition dating from ancient Greece, has evidently fallen out of fashion in today’s US. Educators, now prone to see the kind of character shaped by football and basketball in a dark light, have challenged the notion that college sports produce interesting people. Prominent athletes, such as boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball star Charles Barkley, deliberately distanced themselves from the earlier ideal of the athlete as a model figure. Today’s US athlete is thus content to be an entertainer. Trying to do something socially constructive, like being a role model, will make you seem overearnest and probably hurt your street credibility.
    When I was a kid, my heroes played on Saturdays: they were high school players and college athletes. Pro football games, broadcast on Sunday afternoons, were dull and uninspiring by comparison. After all, why would God schedule any thing important for Sunday? You’ve got school the next day.
    Although I certainly couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I think I must already have sensed that throwing a ball or catching passes was a fairly pointless thing to be good at. In the grand scheme, it was a silly preparation for a job. Yet playing sports was not pointless; the point, however, was that you were learning something—a disposition, a certain virtue, a capacity for arduous endeavor—that might be of value when you later embarked upon a productive career as a doctor or a schoolteacher or a businessman. The optimism of those Saturday afternoons was contagious. I still feel that way today.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案A
解析 文章的第一部分谈到了尽管"Ideas about the educational value of sports vary widely关于体育的教育价值的认识很宽泛，不尽相同，但是For some, sports foster the social development of young people, teaching kids how to interact with their Deem outside the classroom. Sports teach kids what it means to compete—how to cope with losing, how to respond gracefully to success. Sports are about teamwork, how to work together toward a common goal. Sometimes they’re about developing a sense of self esteem. Sometimes they’re simply about finding a healthy way to tire hyperactive kids out so they’ll sit still in class or get to bed at a reasonable hour. Some bolder advocates claim that their games build character;作者的总结句是"Sports, in short, are a kind of education, which can teach important life skills that can’t be team ed in school."
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