Football as school policy is folly
By Steven Khan (T&T Express)
Part I
THE figure of $300,000 is what the propaganda, sorry, e-mail, from my Past Students' Association suggests as an estimate of the cost to finance the school's football campaign for the upcoming season. Indeed at my alma mater, and former place of employment, where the principal's vision is "to be recognised as the Best Catholic Boys' School by 2010" through deployment of strategies aimed at "raising the public profile of the school in all spheres," success at football has been named explicitly as being integral to realising his vision in the administrative policy framework.
Let me be clear at the outset that I see football, competitive sport, and physical activity in general, as being important elements of curricula for maintaining healthy individual and social lives, in and out of school, and at the national level. This fact should not blind us to the negative educational consequences that follow from flawed decision-making processes that lie behind the neurotic, almost monomaniac pursuit of football as policy, or indeed any goal which does not have at its heart the support and improvement of learning.
Every year when exam results are released an alarm is raised about the performance of boys in general and boys' schools in particular. One explanation given short shrift in analyses is the carnival mentality of "half days" and "whole days" off to attend football matches in the important first term in some schools. As much as one-third of class time can be lost in the first term with the unreasonable expectation that all teachers can and must somehow manufacture more time for their students.
Many of the non-competitive, occasionally athletic, students make up such deficits by seeking out extra lessons. The top girls' secondary schools are not so encumbered. Some of the under-performance of boys in examinations is perhaps attributable to this lost face-to-face class time and not to some inherent deficiency on their part or to poor teaching.
The necessity of winning, demonstrating dominance and increasing recognition no matter the cost, perhaps at almost any cost, is fiscally irresponsible. The girls' schools, by not engaging in such massive single expenditures, perhaps have more resources to draw on for funding the no-less-visible or important academic and co-curricular pursuits.
The winner-take-all mentality, the obsession with being the best at any cost marks, masks, and makes the bodies of our young talented footballers into economic commodities-semi-professionals.
Individual skill is traded up for the educational capital in our society of having worn the uniform of a prestige school and access to those networks of power and privilege. Coaches scout and poach talent everywhere. Like other flesh-peddlers they make promises, play on fears and dreams and take advantage of ignorance.
One of the follies of football as policy is that it treats individuals as a means to an end - with little concern for what happens after the season and any vain glories celebrated are over.
Football as policy also serves to undermine teacher professionalism and systems of meritocracy upon which a sustainable culture of academic excellence can be built. Government-assisted secondary schools have final discretion in who they allow into sixth form. What many are unaware of is that the process of selecting the sixth form intake has already begun. With the e-mail sent long before CSEC results have been released the machine has been turned on.
Teachers are not part of that process. Even when they are part of the process to enact a completely meritocratic selection based on past performance (academic and behavioural) they are too often thwarted by principals, coaches or the board. Many schools are businesses masquerading as intellectual enterprises. Indeed, "busy-men", not patient thoughtful teachers or educators, dominate educational decision-making.
Once a student is selected for a non-academic reason, with sub-par grades, either the minimum requirements or not even that, anyone with grades as good as or better who has applied, but fails to be admitted, has a valid case for being admitted also under a system which proclaims that admission policies are fair, just and based on principle.
Fear of litigation perhaps leads to the excessive intake of students such that class numbers are sometimes double the recommended number in some schools. Teachers must shut up and suck it up as their professional autonomy is undermined. Again these are elements of a genre that perhaps contributes to the continued underperformance of Catholic boys' schools relative to their female and Presbyterian counterparts.
Denominational schools however are partially protected from litigation arising from academic discrimination by not having to make their decision-making public, in much the same way they don't have to justify who they take on the 20 per cent for the SEA.
Government and the people of T&T may not think that they pay to subsidise students coming into a sixth form to play football in order to increase the prestige brand's recognition. If they think about it at all, they might believe that they are paying for the all-round development of the individual-for whom football and other curricular activities are appropriately balanced. How naive of them!
Unfortunately, not selecting the best students that one can, undermining teacher autonomy and professionalism, over-subscribing courses of study in enacting the football as policy folly has consequences for teacher morale, health, absenteeism, good-will, school spirit and student achievement.
Football as school policy is folly
By Steven Khan (T&T Express)
Part II
Steven Khan concludes his discussion on what he sees as a worrying trend among certain schools. Part I was carried in the Saturday Express.
Again, one does not have to go much further than the culture of some schools, that ought to be doing much better, and their policy framework that somehow imagines that excellent results can come before excellent motivated teachers, with football strategically serving up recognition somewhere in the midfield, to explain and understand the continued mediocrity of their academic achievements.
This logic runs contrary to every successful academic institution that I am aware of. It makes perfect sense in business however. But like politics, business has a morality of its own.
Indeed, in business, the expression "you've got to spend money to make money" is not unheard of. Spending $300,000 on football to "experience even greater success in the upcoming season" than last year is really small change chasing the big money, millions of dollars, in alumni and business contributions to make up government shortfalls in advancing other developmental agendas. I wonder, though, how reasonable and sustainable the budget is in these belt-tightening times and how the cost to manage a school football season could skyrocket by 375 per cent from $80,000 a mere three years ago to $300,000 at present. I can't begin to imagine how much money will circulate during this season when you consider the schools involved if this is what one school is willing to spend. I shudder at the thought of the potential for corruption.
Barring sponsorship and donations where would $300,000 to cover $1000 per game laundry bills, $800 boots, meals and transportation costs have normally come from? The answer is these costs would have been invisibly borne, as in the recent past, by being distributed among the community, parents and well-wishers.
My first point here is to highlight the type and value of resources that one usually takes for granted in a community and to draw attention to the fact that while other school communities may not be able to raise the same kinds of funds their respective communities nevertheless contribute directly to their representatives. In such cases the team indeed comes to represent the community from which the players come.
My second point is that competitive football in schools, unlike most other after-school curricular activities is far from a free activity. As in other areas of life where market values predominate, those who can pay can play. I am sure others blanch at these costs for a single activity in a school. As the email wisely suggests at one point, a washing machine and dryer would be a better investment for the school community than $30,000 in laundry bills! In helping football to find a sustainable place in the school's curriculum, more of that sort of reasoning is necessary.
Those who have been reading between the lines will see my thinly veiled allusions to events at the national level-where football cannot escape politics and politics is treated like a football by those who are ruining our society and institutions. Many of whom, having passed through the same types of schools enacting this pedagogy have learnt the lessons of football as policy on and off the field.
Indeed part of my moral outrage and reason for this lengthy response are the similarities and grim resonances I find between the email request by the past students association, statements by the principal and our PM and his companions. I find intolerable those pecuniary truths which exaggerate accomplishment, defy evidence, confuse correlations with causation and seek justification for personal ambition and monomaniacal monument at the expense of individual lives, sustainability and security. School is often championed as being a microcosm of society. Our national culture nests in schools and the similarities between the current climates in school and in political life at the national level ought to trouble us greatly.
I implore educators of all schools now, not just Catholic colleges, to consider my previous advice to work ceaselessly to, "create schools and curricula that are of the community, not merely in the community, or worse, that live on and off, and contribute only waste for life in the community; and to compete to outdo each other in responsibility, goodness, imagination, virtue and generosity to one another."
Football as school policy as historically and currently enacted is not the route. Indeed, there has been for far too long an unholy alliance among greed, ungraciousness, irresponsibility, aconsequentality, and a false sense of entitlement surrounding success at the expense of others which I do not believe would find favour with serious educational philosophies including those of the religious Founders of many of these institutions.
I wish my college team any and all deserved successes. However, if my alma mater should happen to win this year I wonder what they will find it necessary to spend to keep on winning. How much will they ask for in next year's email or the year after that? Half-a-million dollars - When will it be too much? What will be the cost? I like meh school and I like meh football but this nonsense have to stop!
- Steven Khan is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Education.
