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>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy Sports are part of a trad
by slg 7y ago
>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy
Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. That is why the Ivy League schools have some of the largest athletic departments in the country even though they don't generate revenue anywhere close to schools like Alabama or Ohio State. It is really no different than a school having a music or a theater program. Alabama just so happens to be the Juilliard of football. There are certainly some schools that shouldn't be spending what they do on their athletic department, but the idea that they need to generate a profit is just as flawed as expecting a public school's theater department to turn a profit. That said, there is no question that Alabama makes a solid profit on their football team.
Also the baseball industry is run differently because minor league baseball exists. There is not much of a minor league system in either basketball or football that provides a well defined development path for high school athletes. Both the NBA, NFL, and various independent organizations have tried developing them over the years, but college athletics is still the primary route for all American born professional basketball and football players. Universities and the NCAA are just taking advantage of that market need for minor league sports.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. A traditional, old-school liberal arts education consists of exactly the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium ([Latin] grammar, logic, and rhetoric) followed by the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, theory of music, and astronomy.) The slightly less old-school version takes the old trivium deemphasizes formal logic, and adds Greek, history, moral philosophy, and poetry.
- slg 7y agoI should have been more specific. I was not referring to a European or Renaissance idea of Liberal Arts, but more the 19th century US version that was used as the basis for a large number of American universities especially in the Northeast. Athletics and fitness played a central part in the educational experience there. Once again, that is why Ivy League schools generally have athletics departments that rank among the largest in the nation in terms of number of participants.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoWe let students major in theater, but not in football. There's a big difference.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> We let students major in theater, but not in football. Well, we usually don't call it “football” specifically, but “exercise science” or something similar is commonly available. And Baylor has “general studies”, which despite the generic name is intended to support “general career areas of health, fitness, recreation, and sport”, and that's what most of their football players major in.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoDo you have to be on a team for those majors? Or does it count towards them? If not, I'd say that's still not the same.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Do you have to be on a team for those majors? Or does it count towards them? Varsity sports provides letter-graded credits in “classes” available only to student athletes at many colleges and universities, and those credits are generally applicable to general ed requirements for any major to whatever limits generally apply to PE credits, and to major requirements in some related majors, yes.
- topkai22 7y agoI’ll also throw out that when I played (D3) football in college, the intellectual load of the sport was higher than in some of my academic classes. We’d spend an hour a day studying film, and on the field we were expected to know understand how our actions would effect multiple other parties in a system. I still think I got more (intellectually) out of college level football than I did out of intro level sociology.
- kelnos 7y ago