Understanding the relationship between sports and education
Correspondent | Tuesday June 10, 2014 13:54
While many parents believe that participation in sports will enhance children’s learning capacity, some still believe that sports gets in the way of their children’s achievement. Whether sports helps or distracts from achievement depends on the extent of children’s involvement and the type of experiences they have during their sporting activities.
Team sports can be particularly good in preparing children for collaborative learning. The role of a team sport coach is basically to train athletes at individual level for fitness and at team level so that they acquire the relevant team skills to eventually win as a team.
In an academic set up, our learners could very well work under the guidance of an Academic Counsellor (AC). An AC’S role is to guide learners in developing more effective and efficient study skills. They work with students both in one-on-one appointments as well as in groups. AC’s are carefully trained to facilitate students in acquiring skills such as effective time management and organisation. Group work or collaborative learning is very effective in that students get to learn from each other (peer education) and retain information better. A reputable American psychologist called William Glasser, discovered that we learn 95% of what we teach to others. Team sports therefore, teach players and spectators the power of working effectively with others. Other benefits related to sports include:
Promotion of healthy brainpower
Research shows that physical exercise increases the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain, hence giving the brain the right ingredients to function efficiently. According to John Ratey MD, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, people who exercise regularly have improved short-term memory, exhibit faster reaction time, and have higher level of creativity. Faster reaction time can come in very handy in an educational setting, when writing an examination. It can greatly help the candidate to answer all the exam questions within the allocated time.
Sports can teach learners to persevere through life’s challenges. With the right mentorship, children who participate in challenging sports contests learn to love classroom challenges, hence improved achievement. Sports also teach children self-discipline and perseverance, a skill needed both in educational and general life situations. Good athletes stay in the game and follow professional help to play their best even when they are losing. Similarly, a good learner stays in school and follows professional help to learn to the best of their ability, even when they initially perform poorly in their academics. Competitive sports can teach children, both athletes and spectators, to associate achievement with persistent hard work (rather than miracles), hence a very good Operant Conditioning technique (a theory developed by B.F Skinner some years ago). In this way, children simply learn that a man shall reap what they sow.
Learning a lot through watching sports
Hopefully, our learners gained a lot from the rules of good sportsmanship as they watched the attitudes of different players when they were victorious or when they lost, during the just ended Youth Africa Games. Parents could help children interpret appropriate attitudes and sportsmanship, while viewing games together. This often facilitates the emotional bonding of sons with their dads, which is especially important for developing male self-confidence. Similarly, parents have a role to play in encouraging their children to learn with the right attitudes, without putting overwhelming pressure on them.
Children who play team sports develop interpersonal skills
As Ross Morrison, a top British wheelchair rugby athlete says “When you play a team sport you learn that it doesn’t just come down to the best player.” He explains that team sports help individuals to learn to work in a team, accepting decisions and embracing the different abilities other people have. Similarly, team sports can teach children to bargain in collaborative learning such as study groups, where everybody adds value by bringing in their different abilities.
Team sports also help children to have a sense of belonging/team membership. A sense of belonging is a basic human need as stated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Any parent knows that a child can be extremely egocentric. But that “my way or the highway” attitude can effectively be dealt with in a team sport. When a kid sees that everyone gets to play, they hopefully start to think about the group as a whole, and not just themselves. This humanistic value (“botho” in Setswana) can go a long way in preventing Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), a dysfunctional behaviour that is shown by being consistently disobedient to authority. If not taken care of well in time, ODD can later on develop into a more serious Conduct Disorder (CD), another mental disorder that makes people to commit more fatal offenses such as rape and murder.
*Victoria Sethibe is a teacher by profession and these are her personal views.