It’s a distinction that dates back to our oldest civilizations: athletic, highly competitive people (so-called “jocks”) and their studious, highly intelligent counterparts (often referred to as “nerds”). It goes without saying that this distinction has reached the point of an obvious, heavy-handed cliche.
Nearly every movie or TV series set in a highschool or university environment has these two caricatures inevitably coming into conflict.
On the surface, it’s easy to see how this comes about. In any environment, there are contributors with very different skill sets, and everybody has to leverage their advantages to get ahead in those environments.
Those with a more rigorously competitive attitude may be more drawn to the dynamic action of a football field, while others might feel that same excitement participating in a class discussion.
But upon a closer look, one can see that this distinction is not only unnecessary, it’s completely counterproductive. A liberal arts education is not separate from an athletic spirit of competition, but rather is complemented by it.
This can be clearly seen in the way our greatest thinkers and world leaders have lived their lives. Many of them attribute large parts of their success to the lessons they learned as athletes.
Plato’s career as a professional wrestler is a common example to hear thrown around at the University of Dallas, but other standout historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower credit their athletic careers as necessary precursors to their political ones.
Of course, there are stark differences between navigating a wrestling match or a football game and being a world leader, but the conditioning you gain by being a fierce competitor early in life gives you a massive advantage in a competitive or stressful career.
Beyond the professional level of success in a career, the unity of athletics and liberal education is an incredible aid to the formation of a complete person. Success and failure in the academic field follows a simple, generally reliable formula: if you study hard, afford yourself enough time to prepare and ask for help when you need it, you have a good chance of succeeding.
Athletic life is not so predictable. You may have a great team, you may be in the best shape of your life, you may even have a highly successful season. However, one false move or one bad call from a referee could cost you the most important game of the year, and there’s nothing you can do to change the outcome.
Athletic life teaches a person to do what they can to succeed while also conditioning them to roll with the punches if necessary. When the two are combined, it forges a person who leads with curiosity and vigor in their search for the truth, but also remembers that the pursuit may require taking a few steps back and acknowledges that some factors are beyond their control.
But for a person with a liberal education and athletic experience, this won’t result in a lack of enthusiasm for their goal, but rather a reminder that the real goal of their pursuit is excellence in pursuing, not simply crossing the finish line.
In my experience, I often wish that I had become involved with athletics far before I ever did. As a classics major, I spend a lot of time in my classes learning just how important athletic competition was to civilizations that came before us.
It wasn’t just that keeping in shape was a good idea for a person and useful to the community in wartime; athletic life teaches you lessons that are impossible to learn in a classroom. They are lessons you can only learn by being an active participant in the game.
A professor can speak at length about the way pure chance can uproot a person’s life and how working in a team is often the most effective way to get a job done, but athletes can know this by virtue of living it out for themselves from a young age.
The cliches of the athletic versus the studious creates an unhelpful divide. By bridging the gap and uniting the two frameworks of life, we may forge an environment where the journey into becoming a fully-realized person is not only possible, but probable as well.