In fairness, Karyn, most of the student-spectators at schools with organized team sports are also not likely to be "particularly fine examples of glowing good health and vitality." Most high school team sports are focused on the prestige of the school's athletic program, and grooming fodder for the college farm systems, not on the benefits of participation to average student-athletes.

A partial answer might be reversing the trend toward programmed, adult-supervised leisure, and a return to the kind of informal neighborhood pick-up games that were common in the days when most socialization was informal, self-supervised, and outside of school.

One of the worst aspects of modern publik skool culture is the barracks society atmosphere, and organized leisure is only one aspect of it. To the list we can add the encouragement of careerist values among the little resume-builders, the tendency of excessive homework to encourage the belief that the only worthwhile goal is one assigned by an authority figure, and the atmosphere of snitching encouraged by zero-tolerance, D.A.R.E., and the like. Put all these things together, and the schools are teaching the behaviors needed to function in a bureaucratic anthill or a police state.

The government schools were originally created to fulfill factories' needs for "human resources" trained to cheerfully obey orders from people behind desks, line up on command, and eat and piss at the sound of a bell. They serve a similar function today, but adapted to the white collar toadyism of the modern corporation.