"John Milton, in his famous 'Tractate of Education,' laid stress upon the need to purge the young of infantile and adolescent concerns and concentrate their attention upon the ideas and interests of maturity. Any adequate education, he argued, must so influence them that 'they may dispose and scorn all their childish and ill-taught qualities to deal with manly and liberal exercises.' It must be manifest that the over-accentuation of athletics in American colleges works powerfully against this transformation. It is impossible to think of games among young men and women save as reversions to an earlier stage of growth. A really intelligent educational policy would try to discourage the taste for them, just as it tries to discourage the taste for making mud-pies."
Chris Green http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=44901401