Talk:Pep rally

"Criticisms of Pep Rally" - I'd like to hear some opposing viewpoints on this issue. 70.183.63.108 17:12, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

LOL H6a6t6e (talk) 11:51, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, here you are: xkcd No. 588 --128.246.31.6 (talk) 14:25, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

LOL I came here from that xkcd cartoon to see what a pep rally was!Talltim (talk) 21:55, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps as a form of social control? It could be said that is a form of social conditioning by the school to indoctrinate kids into the idea of pride in institutions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.24.169.165 (talk) 09:31, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Goes without saying. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.182.149.81 (talk) 02:04, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Pep Rally where?

Where do pep rallies take place? The US? Ozdaren 05:16, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Not just cheering

At my school, the pep rally is held the day before the Thanksgiving game, and not only do the cheerleaders do their routine, but the boys do their powderpuff cheer routine in drag & the girls who played football do a dance, the senior superlatives are announced, the dance team does a routine, the band plays, all the football players mom's come and the results of the fall sports teams are given. There is also a relay race with a team from each class and the faculty (doughnut on string, pie eating etc.) Maybe it's just my school, but there is really something for everyone, even if the main goal is to get psyched for the game and not a lot of people skip it. User:Where's Nemo?

Belize? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.215.83.26 (talk) 11:37, 25 May 2009 (UTC) Saudi Arabia? Really? Pep Rallies in Saudi Arabia? I'm from Saudi Arabia and I can 100% assure you that a pep rally has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.89.88.165 (talk) 14:05, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Naziism deletion: reliability of info?

I've deleted the following from the main page:

Historical research has shown that the [[Nuremberg Rally|Nuremberg rallies]] - torch-lit, flag waving mass spectacles of [[Nazi]] followers gathered together to listen to the speeches of Hitler and other leading figures of the regime - introduced by the Nazis during the period of the [[Third Reich]] in [[Germany]] were based on [[Harvard University]] pep rallies.<ref>David Graeber, ''Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology'', Chicago, 2004, p.19</ref>

The reference given is available online and the sole mention by Graeber is:

(In fact, Mauss was mistaken. Modern research has shown Nuremberg rallies were actually inspired by Harvard pep rallies. But this is another story.)

So our section is a paraphrase bordering on plagiarism. More troublingly, Graeber gives no sources, not even a mention of what 'inspired by' means. I was surprised to read this when I happened to be reading Fragments: I'd never heard of it, Hitler had no connection to Harvard I knew of, it seems improbable that rallies had to be copied from there (were there no mass rallies in the 1800s or before? didn't earlier demagogues like Mussolini do mass rallies?), and a little bit suspicious due to the source - this would not be the first factual error about modern times I'd run into in Graeber's work who is, after all, an anthropologist. (His Debt book has many howlers in the section on Silicon Valley & modern computer history.)

Googling, most mentions seem to be echoes of or references to Graeber's two throw-away parenthetical unsourced sentences. More searching turned up some details (but mostly junk hits like hyperbolic comparisons, so whatever this 'modern research' is, it seems to be very obscure). It seems to be based on Ernst Hanfstaengl; Ernst was a real person who went to Harvard and was involved with pep rallies as a pianist, and was indeed in Hitler's inner circle. His involvement with Nazi rallies seems to be sourced to his self-serving autobiography, and looking for specifics, all I can find is that he apparently wrote two pieces of music for the rallies and may have coined "Sieg Heil" or some variant thereof. If he contributed much more than that, those contributions should've turned up first in the various texts discussing Ernst...

These specific contributions don't seem to come remotely near Graeber's claim that "Nuremberg rallies were actually inspired by Harvard pep rallies", and I'm not sure 'Ernest Hanfstaeng, a former Harvard pep rallier, wrote some songs for Nazi rallies' is a factoid worth including in the article. Of course, I could have missed key sources in my search since I didn't spend a huge amount of time on this. But given the dubiousness of the 'source', I think this section should be kept deleted until some hard sources are found. As it is, the article seems to be involved in citogenesis or at least gross exaggeration. --Gwern (contribs) 18:47 19 June 2014 (GMT)

What is ‘hype’?

Define, and explain why it’s necessary. 193.119.99.124 (talk) 06:35, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Added Information

I have added more information regarding the definition of a pep rally. Alongside the definition already states, I included examples of what might occur at a pep rally. I also included more reasons as to why one might occur. These changes and additions to the page will better help someone unfamiliar with the topic, understand what it is and why it occurs. I included descriptions of a pep rally that can help a reader to visualize what a pep rally might look like. Pressleyanne (talk) 21:31, 14 July 2024 (UTC)