Met Y in the diploma course on Sunday. Our conversation fell on to the schooling of children - his son is studying in an international school, about to choose an university.
"The new IB system is very demanding," Y sighed, "You cannot just focus on book work and must also be creative, good at presentation, and many others. Only all-rounded candidates could get into those competitive faculties."
I consider that a bad sign. Yes, it is tempting to have a candidate good at every aspect, but the obsession is too much if you have such a demand for each and every of your recruitment. A football coach who follows this rule would easily dismiss Zidane (little use for defence) and Maradona (too short for headbutts). As Adam Smith clearly pointed out, civilization roots from the division of labour. We do not need every person to be good at everything; we need a variety of people good at different things. Remind you: the most all-rounded football team - at least in 1970's and 80's - was the Netherlands, but this orange army never won a World Cup.
It is phenomenal: Netherlands lost the champion in 1974 to Gerd Muller - the German player who did nothing but the final kick of a goal.
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Another bad sign is that we are nowadays taking the games really serious - both parents or football fans alike.
This reminds me an interesting story published in the renowned New England Journal of Medicine few weeks ago. An innovative study prospectively assessed cardiovascular events that occurred in the greater Munich area during the World Cup in 2006. Essentially, what the authors did was to compare events on days of matches involving the German team and on other match days with events during various nonmatch times (the control period).
Guess what, on the days of the German matches, the incidence of heart attacks was almost three times that during the control period!
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