I now understand why the best teachers I have erver had were coaches, I do not mean teaching me how to play sports, I mean Mr Larry who was a basketball coach who taught 7th grade math at Lincoln School back in the 1950s and tried to show us how to read the stock exchange, but I did not understand what he was trying to do until nearly 25 years later when I majored in accounting, and Coach Lomax, who was a football coach at Booker T. Washington and taught civics back in the late 50s and early 1950s. Most of the people I went to high school with at that time liked him because he was the football coach, but I did not play football and liked him because I liked his civics class. I too applaud the boys on the Chicago little team for their outstanding performance, least we forget the power and genius and magic and wonder of the coaches who brought these boys to this level and height of success in the midst of chaotic violence and economic stagnation and post-modern institutionalized de facto segregation and racial discrimination.. Hail to the team and to the coaches!!!!!! But it is the coaches who can help reduce the violence among blacks in the inner cities. They can be more effective then the teachers and the preachers put together because they have the skills and the expertise to work with young people. Now we need to take these skills and not just apply them to teaching the youth how to play sports but to move into the mainstream of this society and become productive and responsible citizens who will receive great rewards for their commitments to mainstream values and their rejection of criminal values and antiestablishment values. Investments in community centers and schools with a heavy involvement of coaches who truly understand the inner city youth and who can teach conflict resolution and with the heavy involvement of people who can truly, not falsely, teach the values of mainstream values such as freedom and its adjuncts, accountability and responsibility; integrity, honesty; trust; and education without belittling and degrading the culture and self-hood of young people while at the same time providing interracial think-tank forums composed of people of goodwill with good intentions while at the same time providing them with the necessary means to overcome poverty and the glorification of crime. This is not to say that the coaches will end crime in the black community; thats like saying the Pope can end crime by the mafia. But coaches can make a significant reduction in that crime if they were allowed to bring their skills to the table of social issue and not just limit them to teaching sports.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 04:52:03 +0000
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