(Download) "Honors and Athletics: The "Sound Body" Thing (Forum on "Honors and Athletics") (Essay)" by Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Honors and Athletics: The "Sound Body" Thing (Forum on "Honors and Athletics") (Essay)
- Author : Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 192 KB
Description
I have always hesitated at the aphorism mens sana in corpore sano. When Juvenal originally wrote in his tenth Satire that "we should pray for a sound mind in a sound body" (orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano), he was not exalting physical and mental perfection; he meant only that our health is more important than the false benefits of greed and vanity (Sat. 10.356). In the modern Olympic environment, corpus sanum is clearly exalted above mens sana, and the ancient Olympics were, if anything, worse; David C. Young has written a sobering account of the rather disreputable origin and history of amateurism and its relationship to olympic competition. The modern participant spends hours per day, days per month, and months per year for year after year perfecting a physical skill and adapting her perceptual skills to enhance it. The NCAA, a defender of modern amateurism, limits student-athletes to twenty hours a week of required athletics-related activity during the season of competition. Does anyone think that an olympic figure-skater or gymnast or sprinter practices only twenty hours a week for only part of the year? While elite athletes are physically magnificent, they appear to be valued for this magnificence out of proportion to its importance. The Greek poet Xenophanes 2500 years ago wrote: Nevertheless, in an abstract sort of way, the ideal of physical and mental excellence is hard to argue with, and this ideal reflects the goals of athletes in honors.
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