Is Education Still an Important Part of Youth Athletics?
(1)Education is an important theme in youth athletics in the US. Young kids, energetic, noisy, uncontrollable, confined to class, yearn for the relative freedom of the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond. They long to kick and throw things and tackle each other, and the fields of organized play offer a place in which to act out these impulses. Kids are basically encouraged, after all, to beat each other up in the football field. Yet for all the chaos, adult guidance and supervision are never far off, and time spent on the athletic fields is meant to be productive. Conscientious coaches seek to impart lessons in teamwork, self-sacrifice competition, gracious winning and losing, Teachers at least want their pupils worn out so they'll sit still in reading class.
(2)By the time children start competing for spots on junior high soccer teams or tennis squads, the kid gloves have come off to some extent. The athletic fields become less a place to learn about soft values like teamwork than about hard self-discipline and competition. Competitive, after all, is prized highly by Americans, perhaps more so than by other peoples. For a child, being cut from the hockey team or denied a spot on the swimming is a grave disappointment—
and perhaps an opportunity for emotional or spiritual growth.
(3)High school basketball or football teams are places where the ethos of competition is given still stronger emphasis. Although high school coaches still consider themselves educators, the sports they oversee are not simple extensions of the classroom. They are important social-institutions, for football games bring people together. In much of the US they are events where young people and their elders mingle and see how the community is evolving.
(4)For the best players, the progression from little league to junior high to high school leads to a scholarship at a famous college and maybe, one day, a shot at the pros. To all appearances, college athletes are student-athletes, an ideal that suggests a balance between the intellectual rigors of the university and the physical rigors of the playing field. The reality is skewed (倾斜)heavily in favor of athletics. One would have difficulty showing that major US college sports are about education. Coaches require far too much of players' time to be truly concerned with anything other than performance in sport. Too often. the players they recruit seem to care little about school themselves.
(5)This was not always the case. Universities--Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Yale—were the birthplaces of American football and baseball; education— the formation of"character"—was an important part of what those coaches and players thought they were achieving. In 1913, when football was almost outlawed in the US, the game’s most prominent figures traveled to Washington and argued successfully that football was an essential part of the campus experience and that the nation would be robbed of its boldest young men, its best potential leaders, if the game were banned.
(6)The idea that competitive sports build character, a western tradition dating from ancient Greece, has evidently fallen out of fashion in today’s US. Educators, now prone to see the kind of character shaped by football and basketball in dark light, have challenged the notion that college sports produce interesting people. Prominent athletes, such as boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball star Charles Markley, deliberately distanced themselves from the earlier ideal of the athlete as a model figure. Today's US athlete is thus content to be an entertainer. Trying to do something socially constructive,like being a role model, will make you seem over-earnest and probably hurt your street credibility.
(7)When I was a kid, my heroes played on Saturdays: they were high school players and college athletes. Pro play games, broadeast on Sunday afternoons, were dull and uninspiring by comparison. After all, why would God schedule anything important for Sunday? You've got school the next day.
(8)Although I certainly couldn't have articulated it at the time, I think I must already have sensed that throwing a ball or catching passes was a fairly pointless thing to be good at. In the grand scheme, it was a silly preparation for a job. Yet playing sports was not pointless; the point, however, was that you were learning something—a disposition, a certain virtue, a capacity of arduous endeavor —that might be of value when you later embarked upon a productive career as a doctor or a schoolteacher or a businessman.The optimism of those Saturday afternoons was infectious. I still feel that way today.
Should education be an important part in youth athletics? Why or why not?
【正确答案】：
     YOUTH IS A PERIOD WHEN CHILDREN ARE LIVELY AND ACTIVE. ATHLETICS INEVITABLY BECOME AN IMPORTANT PART OF CHILDREN'S DAILY LIFE. IN MY OPINION, EDUCATION SHOULD PLAY ITS DUE ROLE IN YOUNG PEOPLE'S SPORTS ACTIVITIES.
     EDUCATION CAN PENETRATE INTO THE LIFE OF TEENAGERS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS. ATHLETICS IS ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING WAYS FOR CHILDREN. TEACHERS AND PARENTS CAN GUIDE AND SUPERVISE CHILDREN THROUGH PHYSICAL EDUCATION, WHICH IS THE MOST INTERESTING WAY FOR CHILDREN, TO CULTIVATE THEIR GOOD CHARACTER AND ACHIEVE THE EFFECT OF GETTING TWICE THE RESULT WITH HALF THE EFFORT.
【题目解析】：青春是孩子们活泼好动的时期。体育运动不可避免地成为孩子们日常生活的重要组成部分。在我看来，教育应该在年轻人的体育活动中发挥应有的作用。 教育可以通过许多不同的方式渗透到青少年的生活中。体育运动是孩子们最感兴趣的方式之一。教师和家长可以通过体育教育来引导和监督孩子，这是孩子最感兴趣的方式，培养他们的良好性格，能达到事半功倍的效果。