When reflecting on the topics mentioned in Dyson’s work, I was able to make easy comparisons to the public school I attended. For thirteen years of my life, I attended an extremely rural school district, where my graduating class was only 90 people. While our school was lacking academically, we were known state-wide for having excellent athletics, with many teams advancing into state quarter, semi-finals, and even finals every year. This being said, the teachers and advisors at my school definitely placed athletes on a pedestal, where they were able to easily achieve the grades they needed to play sports without putting in the work. However, this meant that those that weren’t part of a valued athletic team were left to pick up the slack of peers, having to work much harder to get an A in the same courses. Seeing as I was an athlete for my entire high school career, I didn’t really encounter many problems with this. My brother, however, is currently struggling to get straight A’s, as he doesn’t play sports and many of the teachers are coaches, knowing those students on a more personal level. Also, because most of the funding goes to sports, my brother has not had as many opportunities to find his niche. While he really enjoys the robotics team he’s on, the school has significantly cut funding for it to, again, put more money into athletics. This brings one to question how a public school can prioritize winning football and basketball games over actually learning and becoming “cultured”? Essentially, at my school, if one didn’t participate in the correct after-school activities, it would begin to influence their learning in the classroom as well.
I think the issue here is the way that certain activities are given more importance over others because of their ability to provide direct revenue for the school. We see the same sort of thing happening at DePaul. They spent an obscene amount of money constructing the new basketball arena, but were forced to downsize other departments such as the library or make cuts in other departments. Money is diverted to projects and fields that will bring the school direct revenue, whether or not its actually beneficial to the students or to their educational practices. I think that recognizing the structures of power that have informed these cultural biases to favor sports over less popular activities, such as robotics competitions, is important to beginning to look at how we could possibly subvert these reductive practices that select certain fields and certain practices as more important.