What is in Kelvin's Head?

Isn’t it time to stop teaching sport to children?

11/11/2015

Isn’t it time to stop teaching children sport?

It is drug-addled, corrupt, nationalistic, sectarian, sexist, homophobic and brings out the very worst in people. Why on earth do we presume it is something suitable for children to participate in?

From time to time I am asked to comment on calls from one secularist group or another who want to get rid of religion in schools or who want access to Thought For The Day. Often religion is dismissed as something that children should be protected from. But why don’t the secularists turn their attention to sport if they really want to protect children? Surely 3 minutes of Thought for the Day is considerably less harmful than the privileged access that sport gets to every news broadcast in the world. Sport seems to have become a religion anyway but where is the organised opposition?

There have still been more Anglican bishops in the world who have come out than premier level footballers. The fear that sport can induce in young LGBT people can last a lifetime. For their sake shouldn’t we just say “No” to activities that can cause so much harm?

I want boys and girls to learn that they are equal but I look at men and women’s sporting rewards and despair. What hope is there for girls’ self esteem whilst they are constantly exposed to sport?

The city I live in is blighted by sport centred sectarianism and still the violence is encouraged by co-opting children at a very young age in school. Why do they make football compulsory for boys? Why? How are decent parents supposed to keep their children from such negative and corrupting activities? You have a right to remove your children from religious instruction but not from sport. Oh no, not from sport.

I can see the point in teaching kids about heath and fitness. I can see the point of putting gyms in secondary schools and I can see the point of teaching all young people how to swim. But the competitive, money dominated, cess-pit of professional sport is surely the last thing we need to encourage them to believe is a proper activity for adults.

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

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Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

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Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

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