We Don't Need None of That There Edumacation

            One of my biggest pet peeves is spelling, or I guess I should say; mis-spelling.  In this technological world where everyone has to speak in 140 character bursts, I realize that the ability to spell is kind of thrown to the wayside.  This does not include people that use numbers and/or symbols instead of letters.  You people are juvenile and ridiculous.  While I have come to grips with the fact that people are not as cognizant of spelling as I am, or that they can’t be given the restrictions of social media (and those tiny keyboards on smartphones, I hate those things), it does officially chap my ass when a “news outlet” commits spelling errors.  You don’t see this too much from those that post regular news reports (even from terrible news groups like Yahoo!) and even sports writers tend to have an editor, or at least a proofreader.  I read a lot of comic book news, and those sites are full of simple, silly mis-spellings, to the point where I often stop reading because of it.  The best way to alienate educated fans is to seem uneducated yourself.

            This brings me to the real point of this post.  A couple weeks ago I threw a tweet out into the twitter-sphere about the lack of education that many of our professional athletes have, and how apparent it is when you hear them speak.  There has been and probably always will be a fight over the value of an education and the ability to earn millions of dollars playing professional sports.  What really irks me is that we have individuals that are becoming the heroes of millions of children, that can’t even put a coherent sentence together for public consumption.  This is rampant across all of the major sports, but I see it most of all in the world of professional basketball, which coincidentally, is where the biggest anti-college argument comes from. 

            Let’s get one thing out of the way first.  If English is not your primary language, you get a bit of a pass.  I can’t fault baseball players from Latin America or basketball players from Europe (or vice versa) if they cannot speak perfectly; just like I would hope that someone from Europe wouldn’t crucify me because my German is sub-par (ie. non-existent).  You can tell when someone is struggling with a language because they are foreign to it and when someone is struggling because they are ignorant and uneducated though. 

            It would be one thing if we just admired these individuals based solely upon their talent, if they were looked upon from afar with a reverence akin to “I wish I could do that”.  Instead, we get to hear them speak.  We get to hear every double negative and slang term that they can cram into a sentence, and we have to be ok with it because we have elevated these individuals (many of them mere children) to a status too lofty for their age and experience.  While it is our fault for putting the individuals in this position to begin with, we are not asking them to give a dissertation on the economy, or to map out complex foreign policy.  The majority of the questions that sportscasters ask are “Hey ‘Player X’, what do you think about the impending trade rumors for ‘Player Y’?”  To which Player X will reply “It ain’t no thing, we don’t need no help.”  I seriously think Microsoft Word took out a hit on me for even typing that last sentence.

            This is now the norm, and is now largely accepted by the public as okay.  Why, I will never know.  When did we lower our standards so much as a society that the mouthpieces are now the uneducated.  It used to be that the politicians and business owners would have more clout.  While they were usually morally bankrupt thieves, they were at least able to speak to the public without sounding like they failed out of second grade because coloring was just too hard. 

            I love sports as much as the next guy, but it is time we held our athletes to a higher standard.  Basketball stars don’t want to go to college at all because it cuts into their NBA time when they could be making millions of dollars for putting a ball in hoop?  How about having a little self respect for the supposed “education” that you receive (I realize that the education at many sports universities is a joke, but that’s a topic for a different time).  These athletes spend their entire life being told that they are great and apparently have little to no use for learning the proper use of the English language.  This generation is most likely a lost cause.  They won’t change, and they won’t be required to.  The next generation of sports figures needs to realize that they will be the mouthpieces of a society that will continue to get more ignorant based on the people that it looks up to.  This is a fixable problem, but it starts with accountability and putting a premium on education and doing things the right way.  I do not currently have a plan, especially one that will appease the greedy, but it is something that I think we can all put our heads together and accomplish.