Blackwell Reference Online

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High school sports, arguably the most popular extracurricular activity in American schools, have been inextricably linked to the ideology of modernity. Conventional wisdom has it that participants in interscholastic athletics learn educational skills necessary for success in higher education and positive cultural values upon which they can draw as they develop into productive and well-balanced adults. In short, there is widespread public faith that participation in sports “builds character” in the broadest sense of the term. This faith has, for the most part, remained unshaken despite three decades of sociological research from diverse theoretical perspectives that has produced mixed findings about the effects of interscholastic athletic participation. The belief that sport played a positive role in the character formation of students originated when organized sports were first developed in the private boarding schools of nineteenth-century Britain. In these schools a cult of athleticism formed the basis of the muscular Christian movement through which the sons (but not the daughters) of the upper-middle class learned “manly” characteristics of leadership, courage, fair play, and patriotism through competitive sports. This movement also developed in the elite boarding schools of New England, which adopted a similar athletic curriculum to their British counterparts, and the value ... log in or subscribe to read full text