They can be readily portrayed as epitomizing the ineffectual. Education, especially under increasing pressure from industry and government, has as its main priority the training of the young so that they may perform adequately the various roles which will maintain the operations of society. Curricula focus on skills that are marketable. Whilst there is some concern with the development of the individual's potential and with maturity of understanding, this tends to be vague and subject to the insights and whims of teachers. Sport emphasizes competitive instincts accompanied by occasional overtones of fair play.
Religious education tends to be an alienating mix of doctrine, facts and stories.
The only transcendent experience accessible to students is through extra-curricular sex experimentation and drugs. Those with creative talent wait until after their formal education to pursue their own self-development. Mainstream psychology and psychiatry go further in actively denigrating subjective experience and emphasizing its delusional dimensions. Amongst the alternative psychologies and psychotherapies, the claims and counter-claims for special skills with respect to transcendent experience, often by practitioners of dubious reputation, can easily discourage exploration of that experience. In general, much has been written concerning the alienating effects of institutionalized religion and on priesthoods of dubious spirituality with a questionable relationship to the transcendent.