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\u2019s a crude assessment, but essentially, that\u2019s what I find.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0The 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\u2019t step back and recognize that that it\u2019s the upper-middle-class background that propels these girls into top-flight colleges, not the soccer-playing per se.\u00a0\u00a0 At the same time, because competitive dance is dominated by working-class families, it may be that it doesn\u2019t have the same focus on achievement.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
What\u2019s 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.\u00a0 (Even that\u2019s a matter of failure to understand statistics:\u00a0 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 \u2014 it will just further drive the college \u201carms race.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Sorry, Ms. Friedman, but your book is not on my reading list.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So this morning, there was a Chicago Tribune article\u00a0interviewing 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.\u00a0 The author writes of girls playing competitive soccer and chess as headed for the corner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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