{"id":1386,"date":"2008-02-07T17:00:46","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T17:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2008\/02\/07\/a-case-against-home-school-ath\/"},"modified":"2008-02-07T17:00:46","modified_gmt":"2008-02-07T17:00:46","slug":"a-case-against-home-school-ath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/07\/a-case-against-home-school-ath\/","title":{"rendered":"A Case Against Home School Athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re ineligible to walk across the stage in your cap and gown, then you should be ineligible to walk on the field with your cap and glove.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not certain that I agree with this argument, but it is worth considering.<\/p>\n

There’s [a Seinfeld] episode in which a floundering George Costanza is trying to figure out what career to pursue after quitting his real estate job. He hits upon sports broadcaster.”Well,” skeptical pal Jerry says, “they tend to give those jobs to ex-ballplayers and people that are, you know, in broadcasting.””Well, that’s really not fair,” George replies.The joke is, of course it’s fair. Just as it’s fair for state high school athletic associations to prohibit home-schooled students from competing on public high school teams because they’re not, you know, public high school students.Parents who choose to home-school do so for a variety of reasons: … Whatever the reason, they have chosen to bypass the extracurricular activities that the local public school offers, including sports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a little bit like a sign in a restaurant that says “Bathrooms for patrons only.” The restaurant spends money on this bathroom because they are legally required to have a bathroom, and\/or wish to accommodate their client\u00c3\u00a8le. People coming in off the street add to the cost but do not contribute. Therefore it is reasonable to disallow them from using the facilities.On the other hand, it is not socially nice, and it does not build good will, to disallow access to the facilities. One could argue that a well run restaurant in a busy urban area would not mind if the occasional person off the street used the facilities. I mean, after all, when you gotta go, you gotta go. Good will and all that.On the third hand, if I may be allowed this anatomical oddity, nice restaurants in busy urban areas may have the problem that the sort of folk that would wander in to their restaurant to use their facilities are dirty smelly homeless people and junkies. That’s bad for business.But, that is not very civic minded, and rather classist. If you, Mr. or Mrs. restaurant owner, have a problem with homeless people and junkies hanging around in your neighborhood, then join with your bluishness association and your neighborhood association and help work at the root problems of economic inequality. Join forces with other businesses and help the homeless shelter and build a public bathroom. Whatever. Just fix it.The same back and forth set of arguments could be made regarding athletics and other extracurriculars situated in public schools in relation to home schoolers.Do the schools lose the funding per student who is home schooled? Then the schools should not be required to provide for these students in any way. If they do receive funding based on children per district regardless of if they are home schooled, then they should provide.But wait, even if the schools are not compensated, don’t schools generally get involved in community level project anyway? Couldn’t this be counted as one such project? On the other hand, as more kids home school in a given district, if the school provides equivalent services to those kids, this cuts into the overall budget and decreases the quality of education for the actual kids in the actual school.And so on.But what are schools really doing?<\/p>\n

Turns out, though, that more of the country is taking a Costanza view when it comes to home-schoolers suiting up for sports. According to the Loudoun County-based Home School Legal Defense Association, 15 states allow home-schoolers to compete on public high school teams, with a steady trickle of states opening their programs in recent years, said Chris Klicka, senior counsel for the organization. Some other states allow local school divisions to set policies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I met a kid (verging on adulthood) the other day at the gym. He was a former student of my wife’s (thus the meeting). He was huge. Big giant muscles, he was biceps curling 60 pounders as a warm up.He had left high school as soon as he could legally do so, with the plan of getting a GED, then taking some community college courses, all the while working out at the gym every day, with the intention of showing up at the U at about the ripe old age of 23 or 24, huge, athletic, and ready to join the Gophers football team. He had already finished his GED, and had good high school grades, and I assume he was doing well in his community college courses.I thought this was brilliant, but odd. When I mentioned it later to a person who knew a lot about the sports scene in Minnesota, I learned that this was not at all unusual.So, maybe a new class of home schoolers should emerge, to the benefit of athletic-based fund raising efforts at major universities. Get the kids out of high school early, get them beefed up, — home schoolers can spend a LOT more time at the gym — moderately well educated, and you’ve got a super-human breed of athletes to propel the ol’ alma mater to the finals.On the other hand….[source of quotes]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re ineligible to walk across the stage in your cap and gown, then you should be ineligible to walk on the field with your cap and glove.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5020],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-mm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}