And this boy is very exceptional. For the school work as the average student sees it, is the price in boredom and discomfort which the system exacts and which he somewhat unwillingly pays in return for the pleasure and excitement of the activities known (and not known) as extra-curricular. These and not his studies are what touch the life of the student. And these are what the curriculum excludes and teachers ignore until they present themselves as disciplinary problems. The age of high school and college is the age of poignant laboring over the ever-renewed questions of luck and destiny, good and God and evil, of groping after first and last things. It is the age of upsurging sexual energies, of inevitable preoccupation with sex in all its degrees and forms, from romantic love to promiscuity, from fantasy to perversity. So far, however, as the mechanisms of curriculum and instruction are concerned, students are not males, not females, but sheer intellects, uncontaminated by such a vital propulsion, or by any of the others whose development, gratification, obstruction, deviation, realization, or repression, compose the dynamic units of personality in the living adolescent, determining its timbre, emotional quality and behavior pattern. For the most part there is no correspondence between what the students spontaneously and directly want and what the higher education provides. There is no opportunity for the idealistic initiative, for generous self-discipline and adventure, and for the accompanying responsibility on matters of serious social import such as adolescence craves and students do assume in backward cultures like China or India or Russia or the countries of continental Europe. Only athletics provides any occasion for the play of emotion and the exercise of the responsibility proper to an adult. But athletics is formally extra-curricular, is a preoccupation of alumni, highly specialized and professional among its practitioners, and to the residual mass of the students a spectacle, not a vocation or an activity.