The Athlete’s View - Summer 1997

Joel Kirsch, Ph.D.
American Sports Institute

On Tuesday, March 25, 1997, the preceding resolution was introduced to the Board of Education of the San Francisco Unified School District by Board president Keith Jackson. Two weeks later, at the next Board meeting on April 8, the resolution passed by a resounding 7-0 vote. The American Sports Institute and its Promoting Achievement in School through Sport program were represented at both meetings.

Educational history was made that eighth day of April. The Board commissioners collectively became the first-known board of education to pass a resolution calling for an increase in the emphasis on the study and practice of sport in order to improve academic achievement.

Today, the overwhelming trend is for school districts to cut back or eliminate sports and physical education programs in a futile attempt to improve academic scores.

History of another sort was made that spring evening. The SFUSD commissioners became part of the first-known, major school district in the country to proclaim that the body, mind, and spirit must be united, need to work in concert with one another for students to fulfill their scholastic potential as well as their overall growth and development.

Athletes today know that the body, mind, and spirit must be operating together to perform at their highest level. Athletes from two millennia ago knew the same thing, only they didn’t have the current research data to validate what they knew intuitively.

The ancient Greeks called this areté—a continuous striving for excellence in an integrated and balanced physical, mental, spiritual way. Real fulfillment came to those who applied all three elements to every experience.

Most kids are bored with school because the overwhelming learning process is with the mind. For hours on end, day after week after month after year, the educational experience of most students consists of sitting at their desks and using only their minds—read, write, compute; think, analyze, critique; use books, paper, pen; sometimes scissors, scotch tape, paints, but not too much of these things.

Because of this process, over the years, the kids become disenchanted with school and its narrow learning focus. They learn the routine and hidden messages very well: Learning is mainly about reading, writing, computing, thinking, analyzing, critiquing… You can understand why students end up dreading Monday mornings.

As everyone who participates in sports knows, if you are out of balance, you will fall. If a team has a good offense but a poor defense, then it will eventually fall to a more balanced team. If a football team has a good passing game but poor running game—talk to George Seifert and Steve Young—then it will fall and invite pain and suffering. Likewise, if a student spends an overwhelming majority of his or her time engaged in mental tasks at the expense of physical and spiritual processes, then the student will also fall, as manifested by disenchantment with school.

Reading, writing, computing; thinking, analyzing, critiquing; books, paper, and pens are all extremely important to the education and overall growth and development of everyone.

But when school becomes overmentalized and the kids are taught that the mind is more important than the body and spirit, without knowing exactly why, they become bored and disenchanted. In other words, they fall.

Equally at fault for creating an unbalanced approach to learning are the sports programs in our schools that overemphasize the physical aspects of athletics and winning, while neglecting, for the most part, the mental and spiritual aims of sport. In these all-too-familiar instances, coaches and kids get carried away with their physicality. Strong, powerful bodies are forged without a corresponding emphasis on perspective. Sport becomes vindication rather than art, a manifestation of inappropriate behavior rather than science.

In the end, these athletes often throw their weight around and become known as dumb jocks who lack the mental and spiritual qualities that would enable them to connect with all students instead of just their team members. It is no wonder, then, why, in a survey published in 1996 by the New York research group Public Agenda, only 14 percent of the 1,164 fourth to twelfth grade teachers said that sports were essential in today’s public schools.

Academia is not just a mental process and sport is not simply a physical one. With the passage of resolution No. 73-25A6, the San Francisco Unified School District has taken a bold step in potentially reuniting the body, mind, and spirit in our public schools.

If, in the efforts of the SFUSD, a real integration of body, mind, and spirit can be molded into an educational framework centered on the academic study and practice of sport, then perhaps students will no longer wake up Monday mornings dreading the upcoming week. Instead, they will be standing outside their first period classes, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their teachers.