Lessons of the Locker Room

Andrew W. Miracle

"Sport builds character" is a truism rarely questioned by Americans. Most parents encourage their children to take part in competitive athletics, and organized team sports are available to young people from the early years of grammar school through high school and college. Occasionally some disturbing incidents cast doubt on the assumption that sport is necessarily beneficial to character development: a serious injury on the playing field due to gratuitous violence, for example, or drug use, gambling, or sexual misconduct. Whole communities have wondered how organized team sports, supposedly designed to build character, can lead to such drastic deviations from the imagined ideals. . In Lessons of The Locker Room, anthropologist Andrew W. Miracle, Jr., and sociologist C. Roger Rees explore the fascinating underpinnings of school sports, as developed in England, then adopted in the...

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