Lies We Sell Kids, part 1.

I’d love to have more of that conversation, but right now I’ve been thinking about lies we sell kids about themselves. For instance, three of the five prisoners who spoke with my students last week were semi-pro or college athletes. All three of these guys got hurt, and because of that they went from “Weekend Warriors” to full on drug addicts, criminals, and then convicts. All of these guys put all of their eggs into their pro-athlete basket, and none of them had enough grades or backups plans to survive the fall.

I have a middle school student who doesn’t like to do homework because he thinks he is going to be a hip-hop artist. While very talented, he doesn’t understand the necessity of a good education.

Schools often take the tactic of playing to kids’ strengths. For instance, Fenway High School (near some ballpark in Boston) recently brought the Boston Celtics to their school. The message; stay in school, you can succeed in your goals. I’ve heard of several educational programs that tie football or basketball into their educational curriculum. This seems like a good way to get kids engaged, especially inner-city or minority kids who are less likely to succeed in an academic environment.

The problem with these approaches; most pro-athlete were terrible students. Many rap artists are idiots who pump the airways with negative junk that pollutes kids minds. In some way, buy trying to use these kinds of incentives to “motivate” kids, aren’t we really endorsing a mixed message?

Look, I LOVE music, and I think that many great things can come from sports, but the obsession with the “lottery-winning” mentality will lead a lot of kids to bankrupt themselves by age 18, or in many cases earlier.

I work for the METCO Program, a voluntary desegregation program that buses inner-city kids to the suburbs of Boston and Springfield to go to school. Part of my job is that I run an an after-school program for middle schoolers. Part of the program has consisted of “free time” where kids can play club sports and games. The problem I discovered was that the activity/sports time became the only incentive for kids to stay. While some of this after-school time was productive, much of it was not.

I decided to indefinitely suspend the sports portion of the program. As a result, more work gets done, but some students don’t even bother to stay. Other students only stay because it is convenient baby-sitting. That said, I’ve decided that I no longer like apologizing for academics by pacifying my students with sports. I’ve decided that I need to teach my students the lesson that their academic success is the key to their future, regardless of their other talents and interests. I’ve also held out the carrot that if things improve significantly, we can go back to structured activities because I think they do have benefit.

I’m not saying we should ignore kids’ interests and strenghts. I believe that one way to empower students is to base their education off of the cultural capital (fancy word, so I’ll make another post about this soon)that they actually posses as opposed to the capital that they don’t.  I often use hip-hop lyrics to teach a point (another topic!).

What I am arguing is that we have to be aware of the lies that are being sold to kids, and sometimes that means we have to make our children aware as well. We also have to be careful that we don’t replicate the lies while trying to engage our students.