Sports In School

A collection of essays in which various authors examine the educational value of sport, challenging the long-held claims that organized sports are a beneficial and relevant aspect of America's educational enterprise.

In The Miseducation of the Student Athlete: How to Fix College Sports, Kenneth L. Shropshire and Collin D. Williams, Jr., introduce The Student-Athlete Manifesto, a roadmap to increase the likelihood that student-athletes can succeed both on and off the field. They also offer a Meaningful Degree Model, which ensures education pays for everyone.

This New York Times bestseller offers “slam-dunk lessons in teamwork and character” from the NBA hall of famer and former US senator (People). Bill Bradley, whose varied career highlights include a gold-medal win in the Olympics, two world championship victories with the New York Knicks, and three terms as a US senator from New Jersey, writes here about the game that helped form his philosophies for success in basketball and in life. Each chapter is devoted to a value that is fundamental to Bradley’s vision of a purposeful life: passion, discipline, selflessness, respect, perspective, courage, leadership, responsibility, resilience, and imagination. In each, he illustrates these principles with personal anecdotes and observations, creating a concise philosophical treatise that readers can apply to their own lives. With an introduction by Bradley’s friend and teammate Phil Jackson, this “love letter to basketball . . . is every bit as prescient, thoughtful, and just plain valuable a work as you’d expect from a man who never approaches any task without a full commitment” (The Boston Globe). “Bradley hits nothing but net with Values of the Game. Call it The Book of Virtues meets hardwood.” —USA Today “This may be the single most important present a parent can give a sports-loving child.” —The Dallas Morning News

Crazy-Proofing High School Sports examines the often troubling high school sports phenomenon in two parts. Part one focuses on the problems facing educators, students, and parents as they struggle to make high school sports worthwhile. Few if any strategies for improvement in education are effective without first knowing what the real reasons are for failure. Part two offers solutions for “crazy-proofing” high school sports. Schools have everything needed to accomplish great feats via high school sports participation, and now is the time for our educators to be the experts in their field. Written in a language educators can understand, and with stories everyone associated with high school sports will recognize, Crazy-Proofing High School Sports offers real solutions to the real problems hurting high school student athletes.

The authors believe individual educational goals should be complemented by athletic experiences, and desirable social ethics should be expressed through sports participation, instead of the "win-at-all-costs" mentality that pervades most of today's locker rooms. They make predictions about what sport will look like in the future if we can get beyond the myth that it builds character.

Schools have everything needed to accomplish great feats via high school sports participation, and now is the time for our educators to be the experts in their field...Crazy-Proofing High School Sports offers real solutions to the real problems hurting high school student athletes.

Sports are an integral part of education, but what does this mean for educators? Sports and K-12 Education addresses this through chapters divided into 3 themes: sports and classroom success; sports and identity; and sports, media, and schools, exploring coaching and teaching, ..

Nearly half of all American high school students participate in sports teams. With a total of 7.6 million participants as of 2008, this makes the high school sports program in America the largest organized sports program in the world. Pruter’s work traces the history of high school sports from the student-led athletic clubs of the 1800s through to the establishment of educator control of high school sports under a national federation by the 1930s. Pruter’s research serves not only to highlight this rich history but also to provide new perspectives on how high school sports became the arena by which Americans fought for some of the most contentious issues in society, such as race, immigration and Americanization, gender roles, religious conflict, the role of the military in democracy, and the commercial exploitation of our youth.