RSSSuper Bowl Holiday
Feb 4th, 2007 | By Eric Hoefler | Category: Education/LiteracyI think all schools should be closed tomorrow, the day after the Super Bowl, but not to honor the sporting event. Instead, it might bring some tiny level of awareness to how seriously we, as a nation, take entertainment as opposed to how seriously we, as a nation, fail to take education. (This might backfire … I can imagine a bare-chested, face-painted fan saying: “Finally, they get how awesome this game is!”)
America demonstrates its values by its spending. (How do we prove ourselves to be patriotic? By going “shopping” of course … though other responses were possible. Take a look at this chart and think about values.)
And we clearly value football. Nevermind that no one else in the world cares much about the sport (though we keep dumping money into trying to make them care). We pay the average NFL player $1.4 million per year to run around, chase each other, run into each other, and try to get a ball across a line. Seriously. Grown men.
This year, a 30-second commercial will cost $2.6 million. (You can often find more entertaining short videos on YouTube for free … and usually without the underlying goal of getting you to go buy something.)
The average cost of a ticket to the event is now about $5,500–this is so people can sit in a crowded stadium for a few hours and watch all those grown men run around chasing balls. Imagine asking parents to pay the local school just $500 per year to improve their child’s educational experience…
And football isn’t alone–Hollywood and Vegas make the football culture look frugal.
I like fun. I like sports. I like entertainment. I understand their value. But when I see how much we, as a nation, are willing to pay for these things in contrast to how little we are willing to pay for things that truly matter, it makes me suspect our values are out of alignment … and it makes me a bit sick.
So what am I saying? The problems we face in the world of education are much larger than the world of education. They’re deeply rooted, societal, and any genuine change will require genuine shifts in our culture.
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Ha! This reminds me of something Eleanor Roosevelt said once…”Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” Maybe if we were better educated, we’d stop talking about people, celebrities, etc., and start using our brains/time/money for better things. Maybe then it would matter that someone is dying right there on the street corner of hunger while people are trying to decide which religion is better than the other. Maybe then, it would matter that people are sick, poor, and uneducated all over the world. Oprah opened a school in Africa, and oh my, look at the publicity she got!!! I mean, sheesh, with the kind of money that she has, she should open at least 10…(I’m not saying what she did was not a good thing…It is a very good thing indeed, but still…) And that school cost millions of dollars…Seriously, couldn’t she have opened a few schools with that kind of money in Africa (more moderate ones) than a very lavish one, and only one?
But we are all fueling this industry with our life styles…If there weren’t people willing to pay that kind of money for the Super Bowl tickets, then I guess they wouldn’t sell…If we didn’t wonder how the celebrities lived, what they ate, and how they kept in shape, then the gossip magazine industry would collapse I guess. But hey, like E. Roosevelt said…Small minds discussing people is what goes on 99% of the time…
Remember, its the age of Keeping up with the Jones’. We are all trying to one up each other, and have our hands on the newest gadgets and gears, trying to make more money that everyone else, etc. I don’t know if that kind of greed is in our natures as human beings (I suspect it is), but w/o proper education, our hearts will never be in the right places, because we will be stuck discussion people and events.
I really liked your post. There’s so much to say about this topic, and it hits on so many issues, almost all of them “societal” as you put it. But I don’t want to occupy your “comments” page with my monstrous post. So instead, I will blog my thoughts and ideas in the near future on myspace. I’ve been working on a piece that hits on similar points, so just wait.
Have you seen my new myspace header? It says “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And that is a global problem…
Oh and I gotta say I wrote that as I was getting ready to go to a Super Bowl party. But I guess the problem isn’t with the sports themselves…
And I caught a typo. “…our hearts will never be in the right places, because we will be stuck discussion people and events.” Needless to say, I was trying to write “discussing people and events”…I should proof read my posts when I edit my words around I guess! LOL…
Hoefler, you bring up some great pts. I’d love to see teachers nationwide refuse to show up tomorrow as a protest about American values. In fact, it’s a great idea for a young, energetic, world-changing teacher to consider organizing for next February…hmm…i wonder who…