Brooks describes a fascinating essay on the role of sports in diffusing certain ethics and morals to a society.
…American sport teaches that effort leads to
victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps
Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual
glory…. Gillespie appreciates the way sports culture has influenced American
students. It discourages whining, and rewards self-discipline. It
teaches self-control and its own form of justice, which has a more
powerful effect than anything taught in the classroom… But, he argues, college sports have become too Romanized.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
gets a glowing, review from the Times. Just put in an order through Amazon.
Model Cars. Wow!
The New York Times talks about bloggers tweeting about Unhappy Hipsters. (via mattyglesias)
APSA's Teaching and Learning conference is going on this weekend. In an uncharacteristic burst of technological advancement, they've hooked up the conference to the Intertubes. Wahoo. I'm going to check out Rogers Smith tomorrow. #geek
Apt. 11d 
I’ll go read the essay, but my gut reaction is he’s full of it. I think sports culture has brought more bad than good, especially in students. The one good thing it does is get kids to exercise regularly in a world where they do so little of it. But everything else is bad about it.
I’m no sports-hater. I was sports editor of my HS and college papers.
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An astonishing neglect of what pre-college sports do. They raise false expectations that it is possible to get into college without actually being ready to do college level work, they absorb enormous amounts of administrative effort in school management teams, deflecting them even further from attention to instruction than they otherwise might, and they disorient teachers, many of whom believe, quite wrongly, that sports scholarships for college attendance fuel social mobility (they have the reverse effect) and thus mislead potential college athletes.
And that’s aside from the effects of non-school sports. The way that little leagues and soccer leagues are organised and funded i) give them a deeply classed character, ii) teach young children that sport is something that adults organise for them rather than something they do for themsleves and ii) teach them to be professionals early on.
None of this is to deny that college sports had the character he describes for the British aristocracy that he seems to admire, or for the tiny elite that attended college in the US when Hitler came to power in Germany.
Wow, I didn’t mean to rant like that. I played cricket in secondary school, and loved it, and am deeply grateful to the teachers who ran the show.
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I played cricket in secondary school, and … at our reunion we’re going to see if we can’t finish the first match.
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OK, now I’ve read it, and I side with Gillespie (or Brooks’ summary of Gillespie) (Note, I was at Duke the same time as Gillespie, but damned if I can remember meeting him. His CV indicates that he was pre-tenure most of the time I was there, so I am going to assume that he was under the radar then.)
Right here is the problem: “Gillespie values sports, in other words, but wants to reform college sports into something smaller and more participatory.
I’m not so sure. I think he misses some of the virtues of big-time college sports.”
There are no virtues to big-time college sports. All they (and a lot of professional sports) do is create tribal identities, and I’m not a big fan of tribalism. I think our civic life has been negatively affected by sports. People treat political party identification as if it were a sports affiliation. Yes, I’m a Mets fan and always will be, but that’s different from being a member of a political party. If the political party stops addressing your issues, you change parties. If the Mets suck, I’ll probably still root for them because they don’t really address any issue other than my need to follow a team and enjoy a good (or, speaking for last year, not so good) game of baseball.
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We finished a couple of years ago. It was a draw.
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“Hemingway wrote one line that could substitute for … every [Brooks] story: ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?'”
Ok, so Roger Ebert was writing about Nicolas Sparks rather than David Brooks, but the line is too good and too fitting not to steal.
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