Steven Khan concludes his discussion on what he sees as a worrying trend among certain schools. Part I was carried in the Saturday Express.
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.
16