This is my fairly lengthy response to the PSA email.
A shorter version may appear in the future.
Three-hundred thousand dollars ($300,000) is what the propaganda, sorry, email, from my Past Students’ Association suggests as an estimate of the cost to finance the School’s football campaign for the upcoming season. Indeed at my alma mater, and former place of employment, where the Principal’s vision is “to be recognized as the Best Catholic Boys’ School by 2010” through deployment of strategies aimed at “raising the public profile of the school in all spheres,” success at football has been named explicitly as being integral to realizing his vision in the administrative policy framework. In this article I argue that adopting football as policy is folly.
Let me be clear at the outset that I see football, competitive sport, and physical activity in general, as being important elements of curricula for maintaining healthy individual and social lives, in and out of School, and at the national level. Indeed all schools have their traditions of accomplishment in which they rightly take pride and which contribute, mostly positively, to their identity via the un-measurable yet un-mistakable school Spirit. This fact should not blind us however to the negative educational consequences that follow from flawed decision-making processes that lie behind the neurotic, almost monomaniac pursuit of football as policy, or indeed any goal which does not have at its heart the support and improvement of learning.
Every year when exam results are released, and this year has and will be no exception, an alarm is raised about the performance of boys in general and boys’ schools in particular. One explanation given short shrift in analyses is the Carnival mentality of “half days” and “whole days” off to attend football matches in the important first term in some schools, usually at the Principal’s discretion. In my experience as a teacher as much as one third of class time can be lost in the first term with the unreasonable expectation that all teachers can and must somehow manufacture more time for their students. Many of the non-competitive, occasionally athletic, students make up such deficits by seeking out extra-lessons. The top Girls’ Secondary Schools are not so encumbered by this lost time (though their students seek out extra-lessons for other reasons). Some of the under-performance of boys in examinations at some Secondary Schools is perhaps attributable to this lost face-to-face class time and not to some inherent deficiency on their part or to poor teaching. The necessity of winning, demonstrating dominance and increasing recognition no matter the cost, perhaps at almost any cost, is fiscally irresponsible. The Girls’ Colleges, by not engaging in such massive single expenditures perhaps have more to draw upon for funding the no less visible or important academic and co-curricular pursuits? Perhaps it is more their management genre than their gender that explains their success and that of their students?
The winner-take-all mentality, the obsession with being the best at any cost marks, masks, and makes the bodies of our young talented footballers into economic commodities – semi-professionals. Individual skill is traded–up for the educational capital in our society of having worn the uniform of a prestige school and access to those networks of power and privilege. Coaches scout and poach talent everywhere. Like other flesh-peddlers they make promises, play on fears and dreams and take advantage of youthful naïveté. All that is missing for now are enterprising agents for these young stars to negotiate contracts with their school clubs and to hold them accountable should the schools not be able to provide them with what they promise before the season.
Remaining at the level of the student, it is important for sponsors, administrators and students themselves to recognize that as student-athletes they are student first and athletic representative second. They are not professional athletes, though given their grueling training and match schedules that, depending on success, might extend into early December, it oftentimes seems that they might come out better if they were categorized and afforded the protections of such. Under these conditions it is difficult for the majority to successfully balance their ‘work’ and ‘school’ careers in the times allotted. Indeed, while intense pre-season training takes place during the July-August break, some teams travelling overseas for ‘international’ competition, I often wonder if a simultaneous effort is made by coaching staff to provide an academic buffer, a pre-emptive intervention for time that will be lost through injury or fatigue in the upcoming term? My experience and conversations suggest that this is not the case in most instances. Indeed one of the follies of football as policy is that it treats individuals as a means to an end – in the case of my alma mater public recognition as being prestigious – with little concern for what happens after the season and any vain glories celebrated are over. Nor does there appear to be discussion with players of the dangers of having too many eggs in one basket and what opportunities are forever forfeited should a serious or career-ending injury occur on the field. Sponsors, donors, and fans are not usually around then. In business a worker’s value is determined by his contribution to the bottom line. It is sad when we use children in this way.
“Football as policy” also serves to undermine teacher professionalism and systems of meritocracy upon which a sustainable culture of academic excellence can be built. Government Assisted Secondary Schools, like my alma mater, have final discretion in who they allow into 6th form. What many are unaware of is that the process of selecting the 6th form intake has already begun. With the email sent long before CSEC results have been released the machine has been turned on. Teachers, those who interact with students on a daily basis in and out of the classroom, better positioned than most and more reliable than an exam score to comment on students’ preparedness for 6th form and advanced study, are not part of that process. Indeed even when they are part of the process to enact a completely meritocratic selection based on past performance (academic and behavioural) they are too often thwarted by Principals, coaches or the board who have the final decision based on other agendas. Many schools do not behave in ways consonant with their marketing as nationalistic institutions upholding democratic, religious, or meritocratic ideals. They are businesses masquerading as intellectual enterprise. Indeed, “busy-men”, not patient thoughtful teachers or educators, dominate educational decision making in Trinidad and Tobago.
Once a student is selected for a non-academic reason, with sub-par grades, either the minimum requirements or not even that, anyone with grades as good as or better who has applied, but fails to be admitted, has a valid case for being admitted also under a system which proclaims that admission policies are fair, just and based on principle. Fear of litigation perhaps leads to the excessive intake of students such that class numbers are sometimes double the recommended number in some schools. Teachers must shut up and suck it up as their professional autonomy is undermined. Again these are elements of a genre that perhaps contributes to the continued underperformance of Catholic Boys’ School relative to their female and Presbyterian counterparts.
Denominational schools however are partially protected from litigation arising from academic discrimination by not having to make their decision-making public, in much the same way they don’t have to justify who they take on the 20% for the SEA. Government and the people of Trinidad and Tobago may not think that they pay to subsidize students coming into a 6th form to play football in order to increase the prestige brand’s recognition. If they think about it at all, they might believe that they are paying for the all-round development of the individual – a future citizen – for whom football and other curricular activities are appropriately balanced. How naïve of them! Unfortunately, not selecting the best students that one can, undermining teacher autonomy and professionalism, over-subscribing courses of study in enacting the football as policy folly has consequences for teacher morale, health, absenteeism, good-will, school spirit and student achievement. Again, one does not have to go much further than the culture of some schools, that ought to be doing much better, and their policy framework that somehow imagines that excellent results can come before excellent motivated teachers, with football strategically serving up recognition somewhere in the mid-field, to explain and understand the continued mediocrity of their academic achievements.
This logic runs contrary to every successful academic institution of which I am aware. It makes perfect sense in business however. But like politics, business has a morality of its own, one that does not traffic natively in the currency of the public imaginary of school. Indeed, in business, the expression “you’ve got to spend money to make money” is not unheard of. Spending $300,000 on football to “experience even greater success in the upcoming season” than last year is really small change chasing the big money, millions of dollars, in alumni and business contributions to make up government shortfalls in advancing other developmental agendas. I wonder though how reasonable and sustainable the budget is in these belt-tightening times and how the cost to manage a school football season could skyrocket 375% from $80,000 a mere three years ago to $300,000 at present. I can’t begin to imagine how much money will circulate during this season when you consider the schools involved if this is what one school is willing to spend. I shudder at the thought of the potential for corruption.
Barring sponsorship and donations where would $300,000 to cover $1000 per game laundry bills, $800 boots, meals and transportation costs have normally come from? The answer is these costs would have been invisibly borne, as in the recent past, by being distributed among the community, parents and well-wishers. My first point here is to highlight the type and value of resources that one usually takes for granted in a community and to draw attention to the fact that while other school communities may not be able to raise the same kinds of funds their respective communities nevertheless contribute directly to their representatives. In such cases the team indeed comes to represent the community from which the players come and do not become mercenaries – laws unto themselves who are financed externally to mount campaigns over straw. My second point is that competitive football in schools, unlike most other after-school curricular activities is far from a free activity. As in other areas of life where market values predominate, those who can pay can play. I am sure others blanch at these costs for a single activity in a school. As the email wisely suggests at one point, a washing machine and dryer would be a better investment for the school community than $30,000 in laundry bills! In helping football to find a sustainable place in the school’s curriculum, more of that sort of reasoning is necessary.
Those who have been reading between the lines will see my thinly veiled allusions to events at the national level – where football cannot escape politics and politics is treated like a football by those who are ruining our society and institutions. Many of whom, having passed through the same types of schools enacting this pedagogy have learnt the lessons of football as policy on and off the field. Indeed part of my moral outrage and reason for this lengthy response are the similarities and grim resonances I find between the email request by the PSA, statements by the Principal and our PM and his companions. I find intolerable those pecuniary truths which exaggerate accomplishment, defy evidence, confuse correlations with causation and seek justification for personal ambition and monomaniacal monument at the expense of individual lives, sustainability and security. School is often championed as being a microcosm of society. Our national culture nests in schools and the similarities between the current climates in school and in political life at the national level ought to trouble us greatly.
I implore educators of all schools now, not just Catholic Colleges, to consider my previous advice to work ceaselessly to, “create schools and curricula that are of the community, not merely in the community, or worse, that live on and off, and contribute only waste for life in the community; and to compete to outdo each other in responsibility, goodness, imagination, virtue and generosity to one another.” Football as school policy as historically and currently enacted is not the route. Indeed, there has been for far too long an unholy alliance among greed, ungraciousness, irresponsibility, aconsequentality, and a false sense of entitlement surrounding success at the expense of others which I do not believe would find favour with serious educational philosophies including those of the religious Founders of many of these institutions.
I wish my College team any and all deserved successes. However, if my alma mater should happen to win this year I wonder what they will find it necessary to spend to keep on winning? How much will they ask for in next year’s email or the year after that? Half-a-million dollars – When will it be too much? What will be the cost?
I like meh school and I like meh football but this nonsense have to stop!
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