It is a site of bourgeois class reproduction. Like elite college and playdates, professionalized kids sports are an apparatus for bourgeois kids to be with other bourgeois kids, to extract them from their (potentially) less class-siloed public schools, and for people who are not bourgeois to learn how to pantomime it.
We have lost sight of the idea that play is how we become people, and replaced it with the anxious understanding that play is how we become careers.
— Anne Helen Peterson
It would require, in other words, realizing that the best way to make things easier for ourselves would be to make things easier for everyone.
— Anne Helen Peterson
