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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

The reason is money. Where I'm from, only the rich kids do after school sports. The poor kids have two working parents and they can't afford to miss work to pick them up after school. We're subsidizing the rich kids to play sports with public funds, and that's total BS. Not everyone lives in a city, so they can't just take a public bus home after school and the after-school activity buses were canceled.

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That doesn't really fit my experience. Both my parents were working hard hours when I was in highschool and my participation in after-school sports meant that I was occupied until they finished out their work day (which ends in the evening, contrasting with the schoolday which ended in the early afternoon.) Practice before school was convenient for the same reason; my dad had to leave for work at 4:30am, and my practice started at 5am, so that worked out well.

That's a nice anecdote.

In the real world, though, athletics keep at-risk kids in school and trying to get grades because they want to play and need to make satisfactory progress in order to do so. Athletics have helped a ton of kids grow into prosperous adults because it kept them invested in their educations until they realized that it's what they needed to do anyway.

In better-run countries, poor kids don't need to be picked up by parents, or take a bus home; instead, they just walk home.

You've completely changed your argument. First it was "sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education." Now you concede that participating in sports can be a big positive, but in some cases a positive only available to the children of richer students.

To that I say:

1) Plenty of poor kids do find ways to participate in school sports. Let's not throw that baby out with the bathwater.

2) Where this is not possible, it would be better to find ways to make it possible than to get rid of something good for everyone.

I never said sports were bad. Organized team sports after-school are not part of a basic education. Since after-school sports activities favor the well-off, we should not use public funds for such activities. Those education dollars should be spent to help the education part, not the rich-kid sports part.

If you want to have public sports programs, that's fine. It has nothing to do with school, should be an entirely separate pool of money, and IMO, should be entirely self-funded.

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