So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren't educated so much as they are just kept eligible.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the flawed system in big-time college sports where student-athletes are often admitted without proper qualifications and their education is neglected.
Frank Deford highlights a significant yet overlooked issue in big-time college sports, namely the academic fraud that occurs by admitting student-athletes who lack the requisite academic credentials. Instead of receiving a genuine education, these individuals are merely kept eligible to play, compromising both their academic integrity and the educational standards of the institutions. This critique sheds light on the broader implications of prioritizing sports over education.
In practice
In a speech addressing the need for reforms in college athletics, one might say, 'As Frank Deford pointed out, we must confront the academic fraud surrounding student-athletes.'
I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that's largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory - the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls 'the arc.'
Sport is an art: it has incredible appeal everywhere on this earth, and it fills so many human hearts with passion that it's impossible to dismiss.
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
We've moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we're moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we're creating incomplete human beings.
It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.
A man's college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.
The Eeyore Educational System sees childhood as a waste of time, a luxury that society cannot afford . . . Put children in school at the earliest age possible; load them down with homework; take away their time, their creativity, their play, their power; then plug them into machines.
As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure.
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