So this morning, there was a Chicago Tribune article interviewing an author of a book ( Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, by Hilary Levey Friedman) on differences between competitive dance and competitive soccer and chess for girls. The author writes of girls playing competitive soccer and chess as headed for the corner office and girls dancing headed towards working class occupations, or as the interview’s Q+A put it:
Q: I got the sense, reading this, that soccer and chess are for the ruling class of the future and dance is for the servants. Is that right?
A: It’s a crude assessment, but essentially, that’s what I find.
The author and interviewer acknowledge that upper-middle-class parents push their girls to competitive sports and chess (I would say that nerdy upper-middle-class parents encourage the chess) and working class moms are more interested in dance, but she doesn’t step back and recognize that that it’s the upper-middle-class background that propels these girls into top-flight colleges, not the soccer-playing per se. At the same time, because competitive dance is dominated by working-class families, it may be that it doesn’t have the same focus on achievement.
What’s more, the fundamental assumption in this book, that all girls should be aiming at the top tier of colleges, and that their childhood should be directed at those activities that land them there, is disappointing. (Even that’s a matter of failure to understand statistics: if the top tier of colleges select the top 1% of students, then directing all students to those activities that they seem to want will not increase the number of students admitted — it will just further drive the college “arms race.”)
Sorry, Ms. Friedman, but your book is not on my reading list.
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