The Athlete’s View - Spring 1999

Joel Kirsch, Ph.D.
American Sports Institute

Imagine having the ability to ask each and every middle and high school student in America this question: Would you say you are excited with school and what goes on in your academic classes or bored with school and what goes on in your academic classes?

If you’re a parent of a schoolbooks-toting teenager, you already know the answer. If you’re not, national studies show that most kids are bored with school. So what’s going on here? Why are our kids so bored?

This is an issue of major concern for parents and educators. Parents want the best for their children. They want them to grow up, have successful careers and personal lives, and not ever go wanting for a lack of food, clothing, shelter, health, happiness, and love.

Dedicated educators know their job is to provide the learning that will give the parents what they want for their children. The educators know this is a tremendous responsibility. They, too, want the same things for their students.

When asked why their child or student says he or she is bored at school, parents and educators tend to say, "Oh, he says he’s bored with everything," or "She wouldn’t say she likes school, but I know she does," or "Oh you know, it isn’t cool for kids to say they like school."

These are adult rationalizations for something that is of real concern to them. The truth is that most of our children are often bored with school and that this boredom indicates a major failing in our educational system.

We are all born to learn. Perhaps more than anything else, this innate desire to explore, to understand, to create is what makes us human. Watch the joy with which a young child learns to talk or solve a puzzle or operate your computer and you’ll wonder why this joy ends at the schoolroom door.

There are many reasons why our kids are bored with school. A major one is the future-oriented perspective that motivates formal learning.

No matter how often concerned parents and educators deny it, kids know they go to school to get a job, not for the joy of learning. They go to school to compete in the job marketplace, not to find out who they are and what they’re about.

This is learned even at the elementary school level. From all that takes place around them during their early years in school, these young children grasp the unstated message: "You’re in elementary school to move on to middle school. You go to middle school to move up to high school. You go to high school so you can go to college. You go to college to get a job. You get a job to . . . ."

In today’s schools, education is about earning an income, not about learning for its own sake. And paradoxically, learning that is accomplished for its own sake, joyfully, is what eventually produces success in the most practical aspects of life.

John Dewey, the father of modern-day education, once wrote, "Education is a process of living, not a preparation for the future." Referring to the same concept only in a larger context, American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way, "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

Even Mike Ditka, the hard-driving, former pro football great and current head coach of the New Orleans Saints, knows what Dewey and Emerson meant. Ditka has been quoted as saying that the two worst days of the week are yesterday and tomorrow.

Sport teaches us that planning is necessary, but that attention to the moment, to the here and now, is of the essence, both in practice and during a game. In football, if a wide receiver focuses totally on a pass thrown to him and watches the ball all the way into his hands, most likely, he’ll make the catch. If he thinks about running with the ball before he catches it, he’ll probably drop the pass.

In softball, if a batter starts her swing in sync with the pitcher’s delivery and the pitch is in the strike zone, if she swings at it, most likely, the swing will be at the appropriate speed to make solid contact with the ball. If she starts her swing too early, she’ll probably end up overcommitting before she can recognize the speed and location of the pitch and will probably miss the ball.

Athletes from all sports say that in order to maximize their chances for victory, they must take everything one game at a time. If they are thinking about the previous game or about a future game, this will distract them from the tasks at hand that must be done to be victorious in the game they’re in right now.

If the wide receiver watches the ball all the way and waits to catch it before he runs, if the batter doesn’t get ahead of herself and starts her swing in sync with the pitcher’s delivery, if the team focuses on the current game at hand and not on what happened with the last game or might happen with their next opponent, they have a better chance of being successful.

This is true for education as well. If we send kids to school to be fulfilled, to enjoy learning about things that are relevant to their lives right now instead of focusing on something and sometime in the future, they will catch on to learning for its own sake, they will make contact with that which fulfills them, they will know they can be what they are right now—kids who are getting something out of going to school.

As sport teaches us, if we focus on catching the ball before we run with it, if we start our swing at the right time, not too early nor too late, and if we stay focused on what we’re doing right now instead of what happened before or what might happen later, and we do all these things consistently, then the final scores will take care of themselves.

Naturally, we are concerned with our children’s future. But we need a change of perspective. We need to focus on the moment of learning itself. We adults—parents and educators alike—need to teach our children the joy of learning. We need to work out ways to make learning an adventure—because, in truth, it is an adventure, the ultimate human adventure. When boredom is replaced by excitement, when our children eagerly look forward to Monday morning, the future will take care of itself.