The Athlete’s View - Spring 1998

Joel Kirsch, Ph.D.
American Sports Institute

Gene Johnson was a sophomore at Tamalpais High School in Marin County, California, when he made the passing statement in the spring of 1992. Figuratively and literally, Gene was speaking his mind. His remark carried with it a tone of reflective resignation.

To his credit, Gene made it. A black student coming from a disadvantaged environment, Gene went directly from high school to a four-year university, unlike an overwhelming majority of his peers.

Back in 1992, little did Gene or anyone else know how on target his statement would prove to be. Recently, a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the frequency of headaches in both men and women increases with the amount of education a person receives. Further, people with graduate degrees have more headaches than anyone else.

Education has the dubious distinction of being America’s number one concern, and with good reason. For what may be manifesting itself within our national subconscious is an uncomfortable awareness that we have gone as far as we can with education (read: schooling) as we know it.

While the conventional call to deal with this concern is for educational reformation, what is needed is educational transformation. Education as we know it no longer meets the needs of our learners. What we consider appropriate methods and content of instruction no longer fulfill the needs of our students. And, quite possibly, maybe they never did.

How could this be? Hasn’t education worked in the past but just isn’t working now? Probably not. Two important analogies can be made here, one to cigarette smoking and another to medical treatment.

When a teenager begins smoking, the harmful effects to the heart and lungs, the addictive properties of nicotine are immediate. However, not until the teenager becomes an adult and has smoked for many years do these effects become apparent.

During the time of George Washington, a prevailing method of medical treatment for someone who was seriously ill was to bleed the person. The idea was that if the person was seriously ill, the blood must be tainted. Therefore, if the bad blood was removed, the person would get better. Washington, himself, was treated this way.

While this was a medically approved method of treatment 200 years ago, today we know how misguided this approach was. We’re trying to treat education’s illnesses by using antiquated methods that are similarly misguided. Thus, after many, many years, we’re finally witnessing the cigarette-like, long-term, harmful effects of the prevailing methods and content of instruction in our schools.

A simple way to test whether or not education as we know it is working is to ask a basic question: Do kids eagerly look forward to waking up Monday mornings and going to school? We all know the answer to this question, especially parents of school-aged children.

And this is not just the case for those who may be average or below-average students. Several years ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article that included a study of the graduating seniors from Minnesota, annually one of the states that has an exceptionally high graduation rate. In the study, 60% of the graduating seniors said they were bored with school.

Current educational reform efforts to increase the number of school days, lengthen the school day, hold administrators and teachers more accountable, and increase graduation requirements—the prevailing trends in educational reform—are misguided.

We should be asking why kids don’t love school and why they don’t eagerly look forward to Monday mornings? Kids aren’t doing better in school because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. For the students, school is not a place for meaningful growth and development that ultimately leads to fulfillment, but a place that gives them a headache, a place that leaves them unfulfilled.

So what is needed? What must happen for kids to want to be in school? What must happen for them to experience fulfillment?

Our educational system is out of balance, and any system that is out of balance will eventually fall or fail.

Humans are physical and spiritual beings as well as mental. However, the current educational experience for students is overwhelmingly mental and, thus, out of balance. Paperwork and mental activity in the form of critical thinking and abstract reasoning are the overwhelming focus of learning in our schools. The body and the spirit have been relegated to second-rate status in the learning experience.

The prevailing educational reform approach is based on the perspective that more mental activity and more paperwork will solve the problem. However, one of the major problems is that there is too much emphasis on the mental activity associated with paperwork. In fact, who doesn’t complain about paperwork these days?

To be fulfilling, learning experiences must be integrated; they must include the body and spirit as well as the mind. An overemphasis on any one domain will lead to cultural headaches.

An overemphasis on the mental domain leads to a culture not grounded in reality and the natural forces of life itself. An overemphasis on the physical domain creates a culture without perspective and the ability to reflect. An overemphasis on the spiritual domain brings about a dogmatic culture without individuality and the ability to think and perceive for oneself.

Because we are human beings, the learning experiences that simultaneously touch us at a physical/mental/spiritual level are the ones we naturally gravitate toward. Therefore, for education to be effective, for education to be enriching and fulfilling, every learning experience must incorporate and integrate these three fundamental domains.

This perspective is not new nor is it particular to America. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "Never trust a thought you came upon sitting down. The muscles must be in celebration with the mind." Henry David Thoreau had a similar perspective: "It seems when my legs begin walking, my mind begins working . . . any writing I do sitting down is wooden." And from the Lebanese novelist and poet Kahlil Gibran: "It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body."

Many of the current trends in the educational reform movement are really about doing more of the same thing. This is similar to rearranging the deck chairs on education’s Titanic. The ship is going down but the chairs are being reconfigured to make it look like something is being done. No matter where the deck chairs are placed, it’s still the Titanic.

Again, what is needed is not educational reformation but educational transformation. We must let go of and transcend antiquated, unbalanced, and ineffective approaches to learning that throb the head and bleed the students of their enthusiasm for learning and replace these methods with a balanced and integrated body/mind/spirit approach to the growth and development of all children. This perspective must be the prevailing focus of the methodology and content in our schools to enable students to eagerly look forward to Monday mornings.With all that is going on in our schools, one thing is certain: Our current educational system is giving everyone in America—those with and without graduate degrees—one, big headache.

Real change in the form of educational transformation where the body, mind, and spirit are balanced and integrated into the entire learning experience must take place to meet the needs of America’s students, and this transformation must happen soon. If not, the time will come when our national headache will become our national migraine.