Daily Archives: 10 November 2011

Penn State and Duty

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My blog is supposed to be about economics, politics, and their intersection, so I was reluctant to write this piece.  And in truth, the subject sickens me.  But in the end, politics also is about the interaction of people with people, about duty, about responsibility.  But what higher duty, what higher responsibility does any person have—does any society have—than to the welfare of our children?

I’ll not recap the case; ample reports can be found here and here and here.  Instead, all I can do is ask questions.  I won’t address all the key players in this ugly charade; my point will be clear, though.

When Mike McQueary, ex-starting quarterback for Penn State, graduate assistant with Penn State at the time he saw  Sandusky in one of the acts, and now an assistant coach with Penn State’s football team, saw Sandusky having anal sex on the boy, did he not step in on the spot and intervene?  Of what was he so terrified?  Where was his sense of duty?  Why did he wait overnight even to report the matter—and then to Paterno, and not to the University authorities and the police?

Why did Joe Paterno, head coach of the Penn State football team, think it sufficient to buck the complaint—finally received from McQueary—up the University chain and then walk away from it?  Where was his follow up?  Where was his sense of duty to his players and his coaching staff?  Where was his sense of duty toward the children entrusted to the care of a member of his staff, now known to be abusing those children?

Where is the NCAA?  It’s been more than a week since the story broke, and the indictments made public, and the NCAA is still trying to see its way forward vis-à-vis Penn State and the tragedy its employees have created.  How is the NCAA’s duty unclear to them?  Boston College sports law professor Warren Zola makes this excuse for the NCAA:

No student-athletes are involved, for now, and nothing benefitted the teams or the institution for a competitive advantage.

Hmm….  Really?  A coach of student-athletes isn’t close enough?  Because, maybe, these student-athlete children had aged out of the threat zone?  No competitive advantage accrues from suppressing the child abuse, which then avoids the “distraction” of a criminal enforcement action?

NCAA President Mark Emmert did say, today, that the NCAA “will launch” its own investigation into the matter, albeit while staying out of the way of the criminal investigation that’s already underway.  When, exactly, is “will?”  Emmert also said he’ll watch developments and “decide whether NCAA rules were violated.”  The NCAA has no rules involving moral turpitude?  It has no rules concerning appropriate treatment by staff of the children in their charge?  There’s a question in Emmert’s mind beyond the legal one of whether Sandusky did the deeds for which he’s been charged?

College sports have become a professional business where winning is more important than honor.  Lost is the teaching aspect of college sports (and sports in K-12, but that’s a different thread): challenge, competition, teamwork, the mutual responsibility and mutual trust that underlie teamwork, the value to that teamwork of the individual standout who makes the rest of the team better, the excellence of the one that creates leadership.

Especially that mutual trust and mutual responsibility have been lost in our college professional sports industry.  As has the integrity of the concept of standout.

Education in America

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Here, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, are some alarming data that give insight into the state of today’s education system and the state of our pupils in it.

“Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.” the article says.  Further, “Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract.”

According to a study by Richard Arum (New York University) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia), college students spend all of 12-13 hours per week actually studying; students in the ’60s studied 24, or more, hours per week, the article went on.  And math and science students studied 3 hours per week more than did their non-science and -math classmates (that’s all of 25 minutes per day more, for you non-math graduates).

Students often start their college careers in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math track because they got the grades in high school.  However, then they switch out of STEM coursework because it turns out to be hard, and the easy grades are in the so-called soft studies.  And as often as not, it’s just a matter of giving up on themselves: “My ability level was just not there,” said Ms ____ about why she switched out of her original electrical and computer engineering major into a double major in psychology and policy management.  Plainly the ability is there; even in an American college, a double major is no easy path.

What does this mean, then?

In the beginning, our pupils are not being prepared for college in their K-12 careers—and so college cannot prepare them for life in the real world.  Yet without that foundational preparation, our children can only fall further behind—learning and knowledge accumulation proceed on an exponential curve.  Nor are they pushed to work, and so they shy away from work. They’re not pushed to compete, and so they learn to shy away from challenge.

There are a number of reasons for this failure, many of them legitimate.  We can’t fire bad teachers; the unions too often are in the way.  We don’t want to hold Johnny’s feet to the fire and demand that he actually meet serious standards—the effort is stressful; failure to meet them might hurt his self-esteem.  Our children have no work ethic.  And so on.  But if we don’t solve the fundamental problem, these reasons reduce to excuses.

In the end, the fundamental cause lies within us as their parents, and it becomes part of their attitude toward their own children.  We have to ask ourselves—and act on the answers—a number of questions.

Why are we willing to tolerate unions, or any system, that get in the way of terminating the bad apples?  It’s unfair to the bad teachers?  How unfair is it to our children?

How stressful will it be for our children, what will be the impact on their self-esteem, when as adults they’re failures in the market because they’re unemployable or can find only dreary, unsatisfying work?  How stressful and damaging to their self-esteem will it be for them to be citizens of a failing, second rate nation because our economy no longer can compete because we don’t have an educated work force anymore?

Our children are not lazy.  They work as hard as they’ve been taught to work.  They shy away from challenges to take the easy path because they’ve been taught that’s acceptable.