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.
The idea that competitive sports build character, a western tradition dating from ancient Greece, has evidently fallen out of fashion in today's US.
【正确答案】：
竞技运动塑造人的性格的观念可以追溯到古希腊，是西方传统观念。这种观念很显然在当今美国已经不流行了。
【题目解析】：考点：competitive：竞技的。 dating from：追溯到……ancient Greece：古希腊；evidently：显然地，明显地； fall out of fashion：过时的，不流行的。句子结构：句子的主干是The idea has fallen. that引导定语从句修饰idea，翻译时要翻译成“……的观念”或者分成两句翻译。两个逗号中间是同位语，进一步解释idea。