The Athletics-Education conundrum

With our own Georgia Bulldogs getting ready for the SEC Championship game this week against Alabama, it's worthwhile to mention one of the issues related to the excitement and the game. In an essay describing a plan to let college athletes major in sports, FSU psychology professor emeritus David Pargman brings up an interesting analogy in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Why do we impose upon young, talented, and serious-minded high-school seniors the imperative of selecting an academic major that is, more often than not, completely irrelevant to, or at least inconsistent with, their heartfelt desires and true career objectives: to be professional athletes?

Acquisition of athletic skills is what significant numbers of NCAA Division I student athletes want to pursue. And this is undeniably why they’ve gone to their campus of choice. Their confessions about their primary interest are readily proclaimed and by no means denied or repressed. These athletes are as honest in recognizing and divulging their aspiration as is the student who declares a goal of performing some day at the Metropolitan Opera or on the Broadway stage. Student athletes wish to be professional entertainers. This is their heart’s desire.

Agree or not, this is a compelling argument. And one with which our friends, colleagues and students in the arts are very familiar. The improbable comparison seems all the more on the mark in the context of what our student musicians, actors and painters are up against in their quest to 'make it'. They might have much more in common with our elite athletes than we had imagined.

via Think Progress.