"But I don't–"

"I know," Lea interrupted. "You aren't ready for that yet. But you are 'ready to start experiencing one of our students Alphas. Let's go. I'll answer more of your questions on the way to your Gamma building."

As we walked hand in hand around the lake I said nothing for a while, and Lea respected my silence. I was contemplating what C.I. had told me about the social structure of the Macro society.

"It seems to me," I said, "that this is a terribly regimented and over structured society if everybody remains a student for the first thirty years of his life and must live in a student Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. One of the problems of the 1970s is that most young people in the industrial societies are kept much too long as students-'nonproductive' members of society."

"Yes, that's true. But our students are learning how to live satisfying, productive lives. They're not wasting their time memorizing facts and studying irrelevant materials which they'll soon forget because they don't use them in their daily life. Perfect examples would be memorization of historical or geographical details, or your society's devotion to learning foreign languages, algebra, and geometry, which most people never need to use.

"In order to survive," Lea continued, "we learned that we had to remove from out lives the nonessentials and the divisive concerns of micro man. These included his micro family, economic class, religion, nationality, language, cultural and racial divisions."

"That's what I meant by massive regimentation," I said. "There's no freedom left!"

"You mean," Lea answered, "freedom to feel separate from and better than others. Freedom to be selfish and to put your own welfare above that of others. Freedom to compete, to fight, to destroy others. Freedom to pollute by over consuming and overpopulating and by refusing to cooperate."