Laughing, but perplexed

I'm grappling with the fact that people I know are at a stage in their life where they have kids who need to maintain a certain GPA in order to play school sponsored sports. Compound that with the additional fact that at least one of these people has decided that it is more important for their kid to play sports than to do well in school. Yep, that's right. I honestly thought that ridiculous idea went out of fashion (sadly, I had athletes in the high school where I worked a few years back who had similar parents). I just cannot wrap my brain around the idea that somehow it is ok to bash the school for requiring kids to maintain a certain GPA in order to participate in sports. I also cannot fathom how these folks seem to think it's ok to put sport participation over doing well in school. Please, someone, tell me where the train derailed here? Now, I will say that my life has been considerably different that this particular person's life. Nonetheless, she wasn't an athlete of any sort. She wasn't in to the arts. Hell, she wasn't in to anything extracurricular as far as I could tell. This perplexes me even more. I guess somewhere, I could maybe comprehend a bit of this sort of sentiment from someone who'd been a 3 sport athlete and had gone to college on scholarship. Maybe, just maybe, an argument could be made by THAT person. But, she's not that person. I have to laugh because I pointed out to this person that the school wasn't in the wrong. In fact, the school is struggling, struggling hard in recent years, just to get a half decent education to these kids. To my amazement, it seems they've started offering foreign language to kids at the middle school level. I think this is fabulous, because it's a huge step forward from what was previously offered. Sadly, the person I speak of thinks it's an aberration. She literally made the argument that the only reason Spanish was offered was because of the diversity in this country. Seriously? I couldn't help but put in my two cents on the issue. This only led to more laughs because others actually chimed in to support the crazy ideas she was spewing. Alas, I am now one less "friend" on FB, which makes me laugh even harder. Oh well, no more redneck entertainment for me.