Everywhere we look in American society, sports in educational environments are present. Nearly every school in the United States is infused with organized athletics. Teams are not independent of educational services provided by the government, resulting in controversial budget cuts and clashes between the objectives of sports and education. Football, one of the most popular sports in the country, is a school sport under attack for negative effects on student participants. It is the one sport that must be eliminated immediately from all high school campuses due to sacrifices in academic curriculum, induced false hopes in professional athletic careers, and mounting evidence of long-term neurological damage. The most prevalent argument against
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Many parents advocate the sport of football due to American culture and the popularity as well as personal experience with the activity, but many do not realize the serious consequences of such an intensive contact sport. Some argue that just playing a few years of football will not significantly affect the livelihood and health of their children, but they are wrong. An eighteen year old’s brain sample was analyzed by Ann Mckee, a neurologist, to measure amounts of tau, a protein that kills brain cells. She states, “‘You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old”’(Source I). This is a big piece of evidence that just the nature of contact sports spells out serious mental disorders including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which causes neurological failure and death. Sports manager Kevin Kniffin of Cornell University claims, “Sports offer formative and life-long lessons that stick with people who play” (Source H). Life-long lessons are definitely gained, but they mean nothing when a couple of short years in contact football means premature death. Schools should not endorse a sport that literally kills students in the future when the primary objective of educational systems is to prepare scholars for
Many parents advocate the sport of football due to American culture and the popularity as well as personal experience with the activity, but many do not realize the serious consequences of such an intensive contact sport. Some argue that just playing a few years of football will not significantly affect the livelihood and health of their children, but they are wrong. An eighteen year old’s brain sample was analyzed by Ann Mckee, a neurologist, to measure amounts of tau, a protein that kills brain cells. She states, “‘You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old”’(Source I). This is a big piece of evidence that just the nature of contact sports spells out serious mental disorders including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which causes neurological failure and death. Sports manager Kevin Kniffin of Cornell University claims, “Sports offer formative and life-long lessons that stick with people who play” (Source H). Life-long lessons are definitely gained, but they mean nothing when a couple of short years in contact football means premature death. Schools should not endorse a sport that literally kills students in the future when the primary objective of educational systems is to prepare scholars for