On November 1st, 2013, @EA_Athletics posted a tweet promoting the football showdown between EA and Malvern that was to be broadcast that very night. After the game, no final score was ever reported. One week later, @EA_Athletics tweeted the live first-period score of the EA-AIS field hockey game, which would decide the winner of the banner; no score was ever reported. Two months later, @EA_Athletics posted a tweet promoting the boy’s basketball Inter-Ac opener between EA and Haverford; no score was ever posted.
The easy answer is that these scores were never reported by accident. However, this conclusion seems very unlikely for a twitter feed that seems to never miss reporting a great win with one or more exclamation marks. The much more likely truth is that @EA_Athletics, the twitter supplement to Episcopal Academy’s Athletics Program and whose twitter bio promises to give, “updated game info, scores, latest news, tweets from coaches, and more!” simply chose not to report these losses.
Since the beginning of the fall Athletics season, @EA_Athletics has reported the results of 108 games—95 wins, 11 losses, and two ties. Out of the 11 losses that @EA_Athletics has reported, seven were on EA Haverford Day Weekend, two were swimming meets where a pool record was also broken, and the other two were losses by less than two points. In contrast, Episcopal’s total combined record athletically since the beginning of fall is 150 wins, 87 losses, and six ties. In actuality, EA wins 62% of games played while out of all the games @EA_Athletics reports, 89% are wins. These stats show that @EA_Athletics does not share “updated game info, scores, or news,” but rather only the highlights EA wants the followers to see.
EA itself is not entirely to blame for—what we at Scholium believe to be—an excessive push towards advertising. Unfortunately, the state of the economy and many other factors have caused independent education to become a business. Students have become advertisements while administrators are forced to straddle the fine line between academics and sales. It seems now that the prosaic picture of preppy schoolboys in khakis and ties can no longer cut it as sufficient advertising. Schools, such as EA, are now moving into the technological spectrum through media such as twitter.
This year alone, EA faculty and administrators have incredibly expanded the twitter presence of Episcopal. Twitter is the place to hear about snow closings, math challenges, and J-Term news. We at Scholium believe twitter has most likely helped to create a better a relationship between students and administrators. However, we also think that the adverting on twitter by @Ea_1785 and @EA_Athletics has come to the point where it is excessive and slightly disingenuous.
Regrettably, other EA associated twitters seem to be following suit such as @EAWrestling1785 which has yet to report a single loss. To many members of the EA community, the intent and deceitful nature of these tweets is readily apparent. Furthermore, to outsiders, an athletics twitter feed that hardly ever reports a loss and a school twitter that advertises such things as “impressive speakers to appear on career day,” have to seem slightly suspicious, if not ostentatious and insincere.
This is not to say that other schools don’t use similar tactics, but twitter such as @FordsBasketball at least report every score—win or loss—along with their self promotion and posting of articles they are featured in.
At Scholium, our chief concern is not just for the public image of EA but also for the school itself. We believe students have been slightly transformed into mere advertisements of EA, for it is not often that a student can win an award, or just walk back from chapel, without having his or her picture taken to be sent out to a newspaper or featured on the school website. Over the past 6 months, for example, EA has featured 4 Main Line Students of the Week, more than any other school and only 3 less than Haverford, AIS, Shipley, and Malvern combined. We would like to believe that this is merely due to EA’s sheer monopoly on incredible students, but EA’s trends in advertising would indicate otherwise.
This same type of advertising erupted on twitter with the arrival of J-Term, which to many of us at Scholium seemed more an advertising scheme for Episcopal rather than a truly education pursuit. The @EAJTerm twitter praised J-Term as “a rousing success” while administrators used educational buzzwords to praise the “coding,” “dynamic learning,” “relevant rigor.” However, in all of the blog posts and tweets about J-Term, there has yet to be a single critique of its negative aspects. Surely if J-Term is to be a mainstay in EA’s curriculum, we must address the negatives and concerns after this educational experiment.
This is the unfortunate direction EA is going in this consumer minded educational landscape. It seems that we are ignoring our faults for the sake of advertising. Sadly, it seems that this new mindset has forced us to the outside for gratification and praise of accomplishments that are in the end not that outstanding. We as a school need to accept our own bad losses and academic disappointments before we can improve ourselves; no newspaper article or congratulatory retweet can do it for us.
* All numbers are of February 5th., 2014