In the 1950s, the late Earl Nightingale wrote an inspirational recording called “The Strangest Secret” that sold a million copies. And what is the strangest secret you say? Well, the strangest secret is that we become what we think about. A man is what he thinks about all day long, and if he thinks about nothing, he becomes nothing.
Now, that is simple, but it is nevertheless true. If the number of gold medals in the Olympics is any indication of what most Americans are thinking about, it becomes obvious when we know that the United States leads all the nations in Summer Olympic gold medals and is second in the Winter Olympics.
What inspired me to think about this is the approaching high school football season in our state. Over the past dozen or so years I have watched high school football almost completely dominate the sports culture in our state, and I suspect it’s the same way all across the country. To some degree I am caught up in it, too, but I also know that when we think about football a great deal of the time something else has to suffer. I am sad to say that what is suffering is academics.
As previously stated in another column, the Arkansas General Assembly issued a report sometime back that 300,000 adults in our state did not have a high school diploma, and that is in a state with just more than 3 million people. It also came to light a few years ago that only 35 percent of third graders were reading at grade level. Sadly, this is an indicator that a great number of high school dropouts are coming down the pike. Now, my question to you as my faithful readers is, are we happy with this? I am not, but not sure what I can do about it. As we look to the future, I believe you will agree that there needs to be some changes. I am afraid the only way it will change is if our elected representatives in Washington take “the bull by the horns” and pass some legislation to bring this about.
While I was thinking about this, I also did a little research to learn what is the most famous and followed sport in the world. Well, it’s not football, it’s soccer. Soccer has almost 4 billion fans and 250 million players. I suspect the reason football has not caught on as much as soccer is because of the cost of the equipment. It costs a lot more to outfit a football player than it does a soccer player.
Even when I was working with the schools back in the 1970s, it was common knowledge that a school district, in most cases, had the money to build a new gymnasium but not enough money to build a library. Same for a football stadium. My sobering question to you is this: where will this kind of “strangest secret” thinking take us if we don’t change course? It was common knowledge when I was growing up in the 1950s that the United States of America led the world in test scores for reading, math and science. Today we rank 18th out of 21 industrialized nations in these important benchmarks.
In conclusion, let me say that this column is not meant to be doomsday or a put-down of those involved in athletics. I played sports and loved it, but we also need the smartest people in the world, not just the fastest.
—(Jim Davidson is an author, public speaker, syndicated columnist, and Founder of the Bookcase for Every Child project. Since its inception in the Log Cabin Democrat in 1995, Jim’s column has been self-syndicated in over 375 newspapers in 35 states. For a personalized copy of “Your Future Begins Today” send $20, which includes postage and handling, to Jim Davidson, 2 Bentley Drive, Conway, AR 72034.)