Unexercised Minds

On workouts that don't happen in practice

Dad is understandably proud of his son. He plays on one of the best teams in the nation. Which is why he asked about the boy’s grade point average—now, years before the admissions process officially gets underway—because the coaches want to know for recruiting purposes. Dad wondered if that B in the art class would be a problem. I tried to reassure him.

Not for the first time, I found myself bemused by the enormous role sports play in college admissions. (As they did for one of my own sons.) How is it that one’s prowess in water polo, tennis, or fencing—or, for that matter, hockey, basketball, or soccer, all of which can become the single biggest occupation of the hours in a child’s day—can override factors like grades, test scores, or other criteria in terms of admission to elite undergraduate institutions? What’s being rewarded with equestrienne mastery in such a context? Or, for that matter, more democratic games that have become professionalized for even the youngest adolescents?

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the artistry and beauty that come from athletic excellence, no less than other kinds. Nor am I unaware of values like discipline, teamwork, and resilience that come from dedication to the craft of sportsmanship. Once upon a time, the word “amateur” was honorable precisely because it had no utilitarian benefit. We can barely apprehend such a concept anymore. Not with the Olympics. Nor with the NCAA. Instead, we emphasize the payoffs that can come from such enterprises, and celebrate dreams of self-gratification enacted on fields of play.

Lord knows there’s more to life than acing a test. Or completing a checklist of assignments that are all too often mindless in terms of their value outside the classroom—economic value, yes, but also civic and aesthetic value. But I find it striking how few educational thought leaders publicly and full-throatedly champion academic excellence. We hear lots of calls for safety, equity, and wellness, but less talk of the life of the mind as a lifelong exercise. Or to put it in athletic terms, affirmations of stretching and exertion as instruments of building mental muscle mass.

It is impolite, even impolitic, to make such observations. (Certainly a teacher is in no position to challenge the early dismissals for sports that pepper any given school day.) If asked, the sensible reply is: Hey, it may not be fair—what is?—but this is the way the Game is played. Our job is to maximize opportunities and to deal with the facts on the field as we find them. Besides: kids love this stuff. Why wouldn’t we want to sustain such joy in their lives? Because, after all, we only want them to be happy.

I don’t want to overstate the case. There are students who are what we call in edu-speak intrinsic learners, with an intellectual (as opposed to transactional) approach to learning. I’m privileged to teach some of them, all of whom are always a minority in a given society. Conversely, there are plenty of good people for whom school is simply not their thing. And it doesn’t have to be: There are lots of ways to be a successful person (even if there are relatively few to be a successful professional athlete—or for that matter, a successful college professor, an aspiration that is now about as realistic as professional wrestling or Hollywood acting). Teachers need to serve all their students, with patient coaching of the kind the best athletic coaches do.

What worries me is the way intellectual excellence is undervalued in the kinds of places where one would think it would be affirmed most actively and rigorously in terms of exercising minds and developing good judgment. Not to mention taking one’s place in the ruling class, which has traditionally never especially valued academic prowess but did make some effort to inculcate character. The meritocratic ideal was to do better than that, but we’ve reached the point, as The Atlantic recently noted, where reading books is not, in fact, a necessary or worthwhile skill at elite colleges.

I feel badly for students who struggle with concentrating on a discussion—or even a watching movie, now seemingly as challenging as a Russian novel—in a classroom setting. I see a mental fitness issue. I just wish there would be more of a sustained commitment to get our students’ minds in shape. Not making accommodations or inflating grades, but concentrated work on building strength through conditioning.