Being Held Back

"You're a full year older than me, what were you, held back as a kid?"

"What do you think about repeating this grade over again?"

When kids are growing up, they are given certain expectations to live up to.  Whether it's from their parents, their teachers, their coaches, or society in general, kids are looked upon to fill in the gaps that the older generations did not fill.  When a child is held in school, it is an indicator that that particular student needs more learning to understand the material given to them, or they are struggling too much at their current level. But after reading a couple of articles about students and parents in the current society, I'm beginning to wonder at what point parents start looking at their kids as a business instead of an expanding mind.

In the New Jersey Star Ledger, following this years NBA Draft, there were some reports about NBA prospects who had been held back in 8th grade, but no necessarily for academic reasons.  The article pointed out that many middle school basketball players are now repeating the 8th grade so that they can play like a 9th grader at an 8th grade level, thus padding their basketball stats and getting a better chance at a scholarship from a better university than their struggling counterparts, who are playing at their correct level of competition.

In fact, kids are begging their parents to be held back.

Now, I had blogged about how the education system in this country has fallen by the wayside and isn't nearly as robust as it used to be.  But I did not expect to see this kind of thing come along in our society.  I understood that colleges had scouted players in middle school and even went as far as having players and students commit to their university before entering the 8th grade.  I didn't think it would get this far.

The process goes like this: a student athlete is held back sometime in middle school, usually by a recommendation from the teaching staff, but in this case, most likely recommended by the parents.  The student-athlete gets another chance at playing middle school ball even though his body is now a full year in development ahead of the rest of the now current 8th graders.

Nerlens Noel, now an NBA player who was held back in middle school.

It is like putting a high school freshman back into his eighth grade math class and then seeing him outperform most of the students because he's already done all this work before.  Doing something the second time around does tend to be easier.  With his advanced talent and development that he has received from playing a lower level of competition, he now has made himself a visible athletic force for all the scouts watching him play.  It's like a group of 14 year old boys playing basketball with a 15 year old, people will notice which one is the 15 year old by how he's dominating the younger students.

When a scout sees this player doing as well on the court, the scout may approach the parents about a scholarship at a top-tier university.  'He seems to be outperforming his classmates, he will be great in our program, please sign on the dotted line' is what a parent might hear from a scout if they ever were encountered by one.  This is every parents dream; their kid is wanted by a great school and has the potential to have a brighter future.

Here's the surprising part: after the student moves on after 8th grade and enters high school, he can re-declare his grade-level based upon his academics.  Many parents even have private classes for their held-back students just so they can catch up and move back into the grade they were held back from, leapfrogging an entire grade if need be.  A quick side note, I did this in college when I had to take Spanish classes to complete my major requirements, so I took a test and tested out of 2 Spanish classes, thus saving me some time.  Now fast-forward to the student-athletes senior year in high school, he may be right at the age where he needs to be, or he may even be a year older.  He now has a scholarship to a top-tier university for athletics, probably has a chip on his shoulder, and without a doubt, has a much brighter future than his counterparts that weren't held back during middle school.

Something about this whole system of keeping a child back for athletic purposes doesn't seem right.  Right away, it means that the parents aren't necessarily looking out for their sons well-being as far as intelligence goes.  When you first find out about someone being held back, you think that it is because they struggled along the way or didn't grasp some concept.  It instantly becomes an indicator of potential weakness, but not in this situation.

Should parents be holding more and more of their children back if they see athletic potential in their kids?  Why is it that there is no other field that this is commonly preferred practice?  When a parent holds back a kid for academic reasons, it's because he or she didn't understand it the first time around.  No one has ever publicly stated that they held their son or daughter back in middle school so that they could get an edge in science.  It's almost as if we've put too much of an emphasis on sports, because we've incorporated them into our education system.

Here's an open ended question: do you think we would create a smarter or more gifted society if we were to allow an entire year be repeated by students.  One of the side-effects would be that there would be a huge gap between enrollment in one grade than the next.

Now I first about this from the Jalen Rose Report podcast on the Grantland Network, which can be watched and listened to here.  I did some Googling about this subject and decided that this is definitely not a common practice among young men around my neck of the woods.  I wonder if there is anything like going on other sports like Hockey or Football.  It would certainly break the whole talk about education wide open.  It's certainly a talk that we need to have in a large public forum.