two years on the basis of stringent intellectual and physical criteria The parents of those children who failed during their training were given the choice of removing them from the school to follow other vocations or allowing them to remain to be trained as Tsai practitioners without Imperial Conditioning Imperial Conditioning was not so much the creation of a "pyretic conscience ' as it was a triumph of self-deception and public relations No doubt the Suk School administration was sincere m their belief in the effectiveness of their training, they too were victims of their own salesmanship The pro gram began with lessons in self control from earlier childhood, in courses like Environ mental Alteration, m which the child had hung around his neck a baklava, coated with powdered sugar so that even a furtive lick could be detected which he was forbidden to eat until later The three or four year old learned to reduce his tensions by placing the sweet in a locker and diverting his attention with a game In a year or so in Self Alteration, the student might come home from a day of work to find that whether he ate or fasted at suppertime depended on the fall of a die Under close scrutiny, the student's reactions were evaluated complaints or anger were punished, resignation or humor rewarded The idea was to direct any aggression against chance itself, rather than against the lucky Annoyances and frustrations were increased Many students buckled under the pressure, salvageable ones dropped to level two conditioning, the others were dismissed Group loyalty-beginning with the smallest unit, the class-was fostered in courses like Sharing, in which for a week the student was forbidden to feed himself he depended for his sustenance on others Much ingenuity went into these courses in Sharing, the student sat for meals at a table down the middle of which ran a high screen Two hand-sized holes m the screen fronted each place, the food and the classmate to be fed sat on the other side In Sensory Pleasure, students 486 SUK SCHOOL received instruction and practice in group sex-play Solitary and dual sex were not forbidden, but were subjected to intense and constant ridicule, and of course with adolescents, the sex-drive was a powerful vehicle for teaching self-control Students worked at communal tasks from the earliest age, and the jobs were designed to support the community, to reinforce desir able behavior, and to impart specific knowledge all at once For example, students learned anatomy in two places in the slaughterhouse, a dim, smelly shed m which at random intervals loud crashes, wails of sirens or shrieks of pam would echo, and in the hospital, a quiet, any building in which soft music played Hospital instructors were patient and outgoing, the slaughterhouse instructors were brutal and prone to convincing fits of rage From their earliest years, students were taught to associate pleasure with the Imperial and Great House families the nurs