Some educators think the point of school is to get students to do their own thinking.  Others, not so much: the little Caesars in Bucks County seem to think their school is about sports and (for example) the school newspaper is there to gin up pep rallies so the high school players can do their job, which is to amuse ignorant white grownups.
Seriously, how messed up is this: students learn journalism by having their copy dictated by racist administrators? Who obviously haven’t read a newspaper in twenty years?
More generally, there seem to be no limits to the degree that sports, especially football, can corrupt a community and degrade its culture (can you say Steubenville?) if the grownups go infantile; the good people of Sayreville seem to be more upset about missing a season of football than an epidemic of sexual assault (though in that case the school leadership is on the ball).
School team nicknames have many strange conventions, especially the taste for war and predation. A game isn’t a war, or a fight! I always liked MIT’s choice of a beaver (your cougars or whatever may occasionally have a beaver for lunch, but they will end up working for them after graduation). More mysterious to me is all the Trojans; why would you name your teams after history’s most famous losers?
Florida State (and Tallahassee) have plenty to work on about football and bad behavior by players. But the school took care to get the Seminole Nation to OK their team name. I think that’s OK, especially as the Seminole are local to the institution, and Seminole is not a derogatory word. As to Neshaminny, while the logo itself doesn’t have the particularly vile quality of the Cleveland pro baseball team’s, the idea that it has some aroma of local pride only demonstrates that the district’s curriculum doesn’t have much of a unit on Native Americans. He’s wearing the headdress of people who live a thousand miles away, a ludicrous inconvenience for eastern forest people trying to get around in trees and brush.
Oh well, seen one Indian, seen ‘em all, and there’s a game Friday night.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]
