Why Football is Better Than School

The Feline Theocracy's Grand Inquisitor has a post giving 17 reasons why football is better than school. As my own high school son struggles with existential questions about school, I picked up on two of my favorites from her post.

2. In football, teenagers are encouraged to excel.

By this, I don't mean performing up to someone's standards (which may already be limited), but to go beyond anything they've ever been asked to do before, to constantly improve. There is no such thing as "good enough." We congratulate players on their improvements, but we don't give them much time to be complacent we ask them to do even more. In the classroom, we give them a test on polynomials, and the best result they can get is to score high enough to never have to deal with polynomials again.

In his math classes, my son is not trying to reach calculus as fast as he can so he can start dealing with important physics and chemistry problems, he's asked to go at the same pace as everyone else. It's boring because he could be done with the course work by now, but he has to wait it out.

4. In football, a player can let the team down.

Personal effort is linked to more than personal achievement: it means the difference between making the team better or making it weaker, the difference between making a player's teammates and coaches grateful for his presence or irritated with his apathy. A single player can make his peers better than they would have been without him. That's a huge incentive that we take away from the classroom with our constant emphasis on individual outcomes.

If my son gets bad grades (he most certainly does not) it has no impact on anyone else. At work, if you're a slacker, the people around you get angry and, er, motivate you to do better.

It's a great post. Read the whole thing.