Jeremy Tyler and Education

I watched some of the ESPN OTL piece on Jeremy Tyler and I don't understand a few things:

First, Bob Ley says that Sonny Vacarro has been at the epicenter of player development since he signed Michael Jordan to a shoe contract for Nike. Vacarro is a businessman, and a very good businessman. In some ways, he is a visionary. However, I would not say that Vacarro develops players.

As for the piece, I don't understand the PhD's point of view. I agree with Vacarro that we should be far more concerned about kids dropping out of high school with no future, than someone dropping out of school to take a high paying job.

I do see a double standard. Nobody tells child actors that they should stop acting and go back to school. Nobody tells tennis players that they have to play one year of college tennis before they can turn pro and join the ATP Tour.

As for education and learning, I am biased. I was an exchange student as an 18-year-old. I took a year off from school between high school and college, much like Brandon Jennings. However, I knew many other exchange students who spent their junior or senior years of high school as exchange students. People congratulated them for taking advantage of an educational opportunity to meet new people and learn about a new culture.

However, when Tyler graduates from high school early - much like football players who graduate a semester early so they can enroll in college and play in spring football - so that he can move to a foreign country and play basketball, he gets labeled as a high school drop-out and people think all of society is going to fall apart.

Now, who knows if Jennings or Tyler uses the opportunity to enhance his education beyond the court? However, how many college freshmen have been exposed to a new culture, seen the Roman Colosseum, learned some Italian, etc? How is that not an educational experience?

I learned as much in a year as an exchange student as I did in four years of college. I am not anti-education - I am likely heading back to school to pursue a doctorate. However, I also do not think that a college education - especially one year of a college education - is everything people believe it to be.

"Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder."While more Americans are graduating from college, and more than ever are applying for admission, far fewer are leaving higher education with the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity, according to the federal study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Education is what you make of it. You can sleep walk through four years of college and graduate as ignorant as when you enrolled. You can skip college altogether and start a billion-dollar company. My greatest learning experience in college was coaching and managing a Special Olympics program. My "school work" taught me very little about anything.

All these talking heads that get their 15 seconds of fame talking about Jennings and Tyler and the ruination of the United States miss the point: if they are worried about the educational system, fix it for those it is failing. The system did not fail Jennings and Tyler. They may not have great grades - I don't know - but they sound articulate in their interviews - more so than NBA TV"s Gary Payton - have guaranteed contracts, dreams, goals, contacts, resources, etc. Who cares about their grades?

People miss the entire point of education. Education is not about GPA's or the name on the diploma. It's what you learn. You don't need school or college to educate yourself, and in many ways, living in a foreign country as a teenager is probably the best educational experience that a person can have.

I don't know if Jennings or Tyler is making the best possible decision. That's an individual decision. But, I do not believe that these "experts" should categorically disapprove of their decisions without any personal knowledge of the individuals or their decision-making process.