The secondary school and the college are by tradition and practice instruments pat to the social postponement of adulthood and the prolongation of social infancy. By and large, only those children enter high school who do not need to work for a living. They enter about the time that children of the residual world enter life, at puberty. Their attending high school signalizes an invidious distinction between them and their contemporaries, for the high school has been from its beginning a mark of “aristocracy.” Even the “commercial” high school, which is yet of low esteem beside the high school preparing for college, celebrates this invidious distinction. But the real McCoy is the “college preparatory.” College sits _in excelsis_. The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of “college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. Indeed, since the “educative process” worked by the schools is defined from above downward, the colleges, which are for the most part resorts where the well-to-do keep their physiologically mature young in a state of personal irresponsibility and social-economic dependence, set the standard of education for the whole nation. Practice under this standard maintains a gulf between the curriculum and student interests. The school work, as the teacher sees it, makes up the “serious purpose” for which schools and colleges exist. Yet here is what a boy who believes in this serious purpose writes to the _New York Times_ about his education: “In a few weeks I will be handed a diploma, have my hand shaken by sundry individuals, and then told that I have been graduated from high school. I am supposed to be educated. The city has provided me for some four years with skilled teachers and expensive apparatus and told me, ‘Be conscientious in your studies and you shall know.’ I know that I have been sincere, but I will tell a few things I do not know. “I know by heart several slices of Shakespeare and Browning, but I do not know how to write an ordinary form letter that would be accepted by any business firm. I know some irregular French verbs but if I were lost in the streets of Paris I would not be able to ask my way home. I can, ‘amo, amas, amat,’ also ‘en to oikio ton anthropon horo,’ but I cannot keep the ledger in my father’s place of business nor send out his monthly statements. I am a member of the tennis team and know all the quirks and tricks used in hitting a tennis ball, but I do not know how to build a woodshed nor shingle a roof.