To be defined by age as a pupil or student is to be made subject to a system that functions as a total institution, in a society that prides itself on choice and pluralism. What justifies this, in nearly every nation in the world is that fact that the school is accepted throughout the society as the gateway to opportunity; and individual advancement as the most desirable personal goal. Considering the uses to which such talent as has already been identified are put in most societies of the world, this seems both a dubious and circular justification. When the society becomes polarized, the schools come to be considered by those rejecting its more conventional values as instruments of propaganda or repression. If those rejecting the society's values comprise its more privileged youth, both their elders and the underclass are intolerably threatened. A paradoxical alliance then develops between members of the underclass and spokesmen of the establishment to defend the schools against such derogation and abandonment. (JM)