This year, Champs — that spectacular display of Jamaica’s high school track and field talent — was hailed as the best ever. We were on a high as never before. Our last schoolboy football season was again full of excitement. However, the question remains, “to what end sports in our high schools?”

Opiates (opium, narcotics) are excellent acute pain medication, but it is their ability to produce euphoria that makes them attractive to addicts. Our high schools, like drug addicts, seem to be addicted to sports because of the euphoria, the elation produced primarily by the glory and the money, since:

1. Just like addicts have a strong desire or sense of compulsion to take drugs, our high schools have a strong desire to take sports performance enhancing athletes.

2. Just as addicts have difficulty in controlling drug-taking behaviour, so our high schools have difficulty in controlling sports recruiting behaviour.

3. For addicts, increased doses of the drug are required to achieve effects originally produced by lower doses. The same is true of sports recruiting by high schools. Since more schools are doing it, high schools have to recruit more sports talent to achieve the winning formula (some teams have transfers accounting for over 70 per cent of their regular starters).

4. Just as addicts persist with drug use despite clear evidence of harmful consequences, our high schools persist with recruiting for sports purposes despite evidence of harmful consequences to recruited students, legitimate students in recruiting schools, origin schools, origin school coaches, socialisation effects, etc.

So far this year, there have been at least three fatal stabbings associated with our schools. Recently, a youngster, after being reprimanded by a teacher, broke into the school storeroom and sprinkled Gramoxone, a highly poisonous substance, on food for the canteen.

A few days ago, some boys from a prominent high school were involved in the stabbing, robbing and beating of a bus driver. More recently, students at a St Thomas high school were involved in a stabbing incident — and the list goes on.

These and a host of other anti-social behaviours are what sports in our schools should be geared towards helping us to minimise and eventually eradicate. Instead, it appears the focus of sports in our schools is not on what is in the best interest of our children, but rather on bringing glory and money to some adults and institutions.

Let me state clearly and categorically that I am “pro-sports”, “pro-athletics”, with respect to sports in our high schools. My concern is that the excesses and the issues of balance and emphasis surrounding sports in the educational/socialisation framework of high school are undermining what a growing number of us recognise as the potential beneficial impact of sports in high school.

Fanatical efforts to improve sports programmes, improve winning records, gain and maintain national prominence are having deleterious effects that are eroding the very values that sports programmes in high school exist to promote — as well as the educational values that should be central to any high school.

The objective is to strengthen, not weaken, the contribution that sports makes to the overall educational experience of students and to the sense of kinship, identity, and family that is important not only to current students but also to graduates, faculty members, staff, and others who enjoy high school sports.

High schools are, at the end of the day, academic/technical institutions. They are established to serve educational purposes. Education takes many forms, and some of the most valuable learning experiences take place outside the classroom. However, that does not mean that academic and intellectual rigour is anything less than central to the academic enterprise.

Places in a class are extremely valuable in our preferred high schools. Vivid testimony attached to the importance of admissions decisions is provided by the visits and phone calls made to these schools by scores of disappointed applicants and their parents or guardians.

At these schools, the cost of admitting John is the inability to admit James and represents the basic concept of “opportunity cost”. This is fundamental to the injustice meted out to those who would normally qualify for a school, based on our declared academic basis of space allocation, where academic performance and preference are supposed to decide admission to a particular school, aside from rare, exceptional cases.

It is said that sports builds character. I am concerned with what type of character high school sports is building or promoting. What lessons are we teaching our youngsters? How are we socialising them with respect to winning-at-all-cost, the end justifying the means, institutionalised injustice, self-reliance and other values and attitudes? How are we helping to build their self-confidence?

Is it that we are willing to allow capitalist competition free reign and to follow wherever it leads regardless? Is it that our lower profile schools count for nothing, are of no value and should be devalued further? If there were no inter-schools competition there would be no wide scale importation/recruiting of sports talent by our schools.

The drive, the motivation, of high schools to import and recruit sports talent is to win. Although just about all the schools and coaches that have lost athletes whom they discovered, nurtured and developed, to other more high-profile schools, are extremely displeased, and many very depressed, importing schools are like those who take sports performance enhancing drugs, they feel that without sports performance enhancing, readymade athletes, they cannot win and so they steal the glory, the thunder of others.

As we shift sports from its role as a teaching auxiliary, a teaching tool, an inculcator of social values in our high schools, and succumb to the professionalisation and commercialisation of sports, as we give in to the competitive value of sports, the economic pressure to win and continue to entrench recruiting for sports purposes in our high schools, let us remember that only a few become successful professional athletes, only a few will get sports scholarships.

Most of our youngsters give up formal sports after high school. We should also remember that organising sports differently will not affect our profile as world beaters. We need to bear in mind, the rapid advance of robotics/automation in this highly innovative so-called knowledge-based world economy (video.us.msn.com/videos/watch/video/japanese-caregiving-robots/1q0on86?from=en-us_msnhpvidmod).

This means that in the not too distant future it will become even more difficult to find routine, low-level jobs, since these will be mechanised, automated, robotised. The need will be for higher level skills. This is why around the world, countries, while paying due regard to the humanities, have their schools even more focused on the academic/technical areas such as the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The ranks of those who, like me, are concerned about the function of sports in our education/socialisation system (high school) are growing steadily. However, too many are comfortable lining up with the so-called silent majority. I urge more of you to display even a smattering of the trait that Margaret Thatcher, love or hate her, had in such abundance —”balls”. The courage of her convictions.

As was said elsewhere, “inertia is a powerful force. There are always more pressing problems. It is just easier to look the other way”. Few things are more important than the education/socialisation of our youth. We need to reject the path of least resistance. We must speak up, or the vociferous, strident minority will continue to lead us down paths that wise men fear to tread — down precipitous, slippery slopes.

Dr Lascelve ‘Muggy’ Graham is a chemist and former Jamaica football captain