Vox Day, over at World Net Daily, has an opinion on the controversy as to whether homeschooling families should continue to lobby for inclusion on public school sports teams, or to continue their individualistic trek and practice D.I.Y.

• World Net Daily, Medford, Oregon, 1 May 2006, Striking at the heart of the schools    

  The laws vary from state to state, but in those school districts where homeschool participation in sports is banned, parents who wanted to give their children the chance to participate in team sports often opted for lawsuits and political lobbying in the interest of forcing public schools to allow athletes not attending those schools to play on their sports teams. However, this is a short-sighted and sub-optimal strategy for five reasons.

Vox Day enumerates the reasons and then echoes something I’ve pointed out before, school involvement isn’t the only model for sports competition.

• The separation of school and sport is hardly a new concept. Already, some of the most elite teams in the country have very little to do with school – the basketball academies that regularly send players to the NBA and NCAA Division One programs aren’t exactly devoted to academics – and in Europe nearly all sporting competition revolves around athletic clubs, not schools, which has likely helped Europe surpass the United States in both academic and athletic performance.

May 17 2006 in Sports valerie 1 Comment »