Our Environment at Risk
October 18, 2011
My wife and I are passionate travelers. We plan our own trips and we read about the history, music, art, government and food of the places we plan to visit. I struggle to learn a few phrases to get by in other languages.
No matter how cramped airplanes have become and no matter how compromised we feel as we shed our belongings and submit to the frisking and fondling of airport security, we remain enthusiastic planners and pilgrims. And the more exotic the destination, the more excited we are.
As we have traveled, it has been impossible to escape the realization that civilizations rise and fall; and it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that one of the most compelling reasons why civilizations fail is that they ruin their environments.
Some civilizations have done this to themselves, poisoned their own environs; while other civilizations saw their environments contaminated by foreign influences. Some were invaded by brute force; others peacefully introduced new customs or germs that weakened the people or their flora or fauna.
It is one or more of these influences that caused the Mayans, who built structures that still stun 21st century engineers, to be reduced from many millions to a few remnants.
The historical principle that civilizations collapse when their environments are contaminated is worth considering for our little niche in modern society: the enterprise of school sports.
We cannot expect school sports to survive – these programs can only collapse – if we ruin the environment in which school sports breathes and lives.
This is an environment of comprehensive, community-based schools.
But schools are losing both these characteristics – both their comprehensiveness and their community base.
That we have a few schools of narrow focus is reasonable; that we have a few schools of specialized populations is tolerable; that we have a few schools without strong neighborhood connection is acceptable.
However, it does our neighborhoods no good, our communities no good, our state no good, nor our nation any good – in fact, in total, it does our nation much harm – as more and more schools trend further and further in these directions.
To abandon the school with comprehensive programs serving the invested neighborhood around it does us harm: nation, state, community and child.
It is almost irrelevant that this is bad for high school athletics. It’s bad for America.
Adversity
January 25, 2012
It’s been said that adversity causes some people to break and others to break records.
Author Keith McFarland spent seven years studying the performance of 7,000 companies, after which he made this pronouncement: “The top performers had one thing in common. Each went through a period of pronounced difficulty – often serious enough to threaten the firm’s existence.”
McFarland continued in The Breakthrough Company: “Great companies, I discovered, arise not from the absence of difficulty but from its vortex,” its whirly mass.
The key during tough times, according to McFarland, is not to focus on survival, but instead to ask fundamental questions, to face facts that might have gone overlooked in more prosperous times, and to identify and integrate the new knowledge and insights that adversity can bring.
Schools and school sports, today in the vortex of adversity, may actually do more than merely survive our present difficulties if we too examine obstacles and opportunities previously overlooked, and then make positive use of the lessons that sometimes only adversity can bring.
A Scottish author of the 19th century with the optimistic name Samuel Smiles wrote: “The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.”