The London 2012 Olympics have been over for two weeks and I am sill experiencing withdrawal symptoms. The Olympics pack the adrenalin rush of an entire sports season into a 2-week period. There are so many amazing stories of incredible athletes, from newcomers to experienced athletes.
One of the first U. S. gold medalists was Kim Rhodes for skeet shooting. She practices 7 days per week at a cost of $700/day in ammunition. Her thousands of hours of practice paid off in an Olympic record of 99 hits out of 100 moving targets. She also set a record by winning a medal in five straight Olympics.
Brendan Hansen had retired from swimming after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He started competing in triathlons to stay in shape. As a triathlete, his love of swimming was rekindled. He decided to make a comeback for the 2012 London Olympics. Although he only achieved a bronze medal in his signature 100 m breaststroke event, Hanson reported that he had worked the hardest for this bronze medal and it was his most treasured accomplishment.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps established a new standard by winning more medals in one Olympic game than any other athlete. He accomplished what everyone hoped and expected he would, which created intense pressure. At the London games, Phelps was poised to shatter the lifetime record for the number of Olympic medals. However, this time around, the Olympics was much more fun for Phelps. After all that he has accomplished at the Olympic level, Phelps' enjoyment is seeing how much more he can accomplish: ''Now it's just a matter of how many toppings I want on my sundae.''
In track and field, the women's 100 m hurdles was an exciting race. Five women ran faster than the winning time from the Beijing Olympics. One of the finalists, Canadian Phylicia George, didn't start running track until she was in the 10th grade. Although she started her career relatively late, she made the Canadian team and ran her personal best in the finals. She did not make the medal stand, but is poised to return for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.
The advertisers picked up on the Olympic spirit. Proctor and Gamble paid tribute to the mothers of Olympic athletes. They showed moms cheering for their young children and then cheering them as Olympians. Kelloggs highlights that Olympic sports are the same for both young and old. And, right after Rebecca Soni broke the 2:20 mark and set a new world record in the 200 m breaststroke, AT&T showed a teenage swimmer seeing that vision of success and setting her mark to beat the world record some day.
Reflecting on all of these stories and more, I have extracted seven principles that schools can learn from the Olympic games. These principles provide a stark contrast to the standards-based college readiness movement.
1. Schools should make it easy for children to participate in authentic experiences. Most people enter a sport through a simpler form of the game that retains the key features. The Olympic sport of soccer is one of the most popular sports in the world precisely because children can make soccer balls and goals out of almost anything, such as old rags for a ball and garbage cans for soccer goals. Children start gymnastics with foam balance beams that rest on the floor and specialized high bars that are lower and have thinner bars for kids to grip. In the realm of science, 1st graders can repeat Newton's gravity experiments with fresh eyes using a book and paper as the objects.
2. Schools should focus on and promote what is fun about academic subjects. Children will continue to participate in sports to the extent that they have fun. Landon Donovan is one of the elite members of the U.S. men's soccer team. What initially drew him to soccer was the enjoyment of the game and the camaraderie. The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), the nation's largest recreational soccer association, explicitly has fun as one of its philosophical underpinnings. Donovan continued to play AYSO soccer for the fun of it, even after he started playing on competitive teams. Likewise, children pursue academic subjects outside of school to the extent that they find the subject fun.
3. Since children develop at different rates, schools should support students beginning a subject at different ages. It is possible to start playing many sports at any age. My father-in-law first took up skiing at the age of 70 and skied actively for several years. Christian Okoye was a Nigerian-born track and field star, who attended Azusa Pacific University. He won seven NCAA titles in shotput, discus, and hammer throw. When his native country of Nigeria failed to select him for the 1984 Olympic team, Okoye started playing college football. He went on to become an all star running back for the Kansas City Chiefs. Julia Child was also a college athlete. Her height gave her an advantage in golf, tennis, and basketball. She majored in English and worked as a copyeditor. During World War II, she worked as a top secret researcher in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA. She married a fellow OSS specialist and moved with him to France after the war. At the age of 36, Child abandoned her training and went to the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. She is still one of the most well known chefs throughout the world.
4. Since there are so many areas in which students can become experts, schools should refrain from requiring expertise on an extremely narrow set of subjects. The United States Olympic team won gold medals in fifteen different sports as wide ranging as archery and shooting to wrestling, judo, and boxing to swimming, track and field, and cycling to a wide range of team sports. It is impossible to discern some meaningful set of skills that underlie all of these sports, yet winners of these disparate sports all earn the same honor of being an Olympic gold medalist. Likewise, the adult world has a wide range of areas in which students can develop expertise, but do not share any meaningful underlying set of common skills. By narrowly defining "college readiness" we limit our country's success in the same way that the United States would win fewer gold medals if we required every Olympic athlete to be an expert triathlete.
5. Schools should provide students with visions of success that can drive interest in a variety of a fields. After the U. S. women's gymnastic team won the team gold medal, Bob Costas interviewed the team members on NBC's prime time show. He asked the gymnasts when they had first dreamt of winning the Olympics. Each member of the team said the moment came for them while watching the triumph of either the 1996 U. S women's team on DVD or the 2004 U. S. women's team live. In their book, Becoming Adult, Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider present evidence that students learn about careers from their family in elementary school, from schools in middle school, and from the community in high school. Visions of success are scarce in low income families and communities. Schools should be a place that provide students with visions of success.
6. Only when students develop the desire should schools encourage practice for the sake of development. Coaches don't usually introduce athletes to a sport through intense drill and practice. Potential athletes are introduced to a sport by playing the game. Those that want to improve their skills are now motivated to engage in the monotony of drill and practice since it serves a greater purpose of interest to them. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to develop expertise in any endeavor. He argues that the success of charter school networks like KIPP is based on getting students to spend more time in school. However, it is crucial to understand the motivation for students to spend 10,000 hours in practice. The exceptional people outlined in Outliers were not driven to practice by a desire to get to the next stage in life, but rather they were driven by a deep desire to master their craft. Fostering deep desire as a precursor to practice is absent from any school reform discussions.
7. Accountability in schools should be tied to outcomes of importance, not simple indicators of important outcomes From the beginning of playing a sport, children can distinguish success from failure. The person or team with the most points or the lowest time is the winner. Having great speed, strength, leaping ability, etc. only matters when it translates into more points or lower times. Spain's national soccer team is known for ball possession. They usually have the ball for significantly more time than their opponents. However, focusing on ball possession as an end unto itself would be detrimental to the ultimate objective of scoring more goals than their opponents. Likewise, rather than making intermediate indicators ends unto themselves, schools need to focus on the actual outcomes that matter for success or failure in each field of study.
Defining success in school based on a narrow set of indicators is extremely detrimental to the success of our country. The primary college readiness indicators perpetuate significant income gaps in school performance that reinforce an endless cycle of intergenerational poverty. May the Olympics inspire our policy makers to envision a new model of education that values the diversity of successful avenues in life and inspires unique greatness in every student.
