In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction the higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative side; each step which they have taken in advance has been to some extent of the nature of a concession.

The sciences have been intruded into the scholar's discipline from without, not to say from below.

It is noticeable that the humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground to the sciences are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure--otium cum dignitate.

In language veiled by their own habituation to the archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities have insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges consumere nati.
This attitude should occasion no surprise in the case of schools which are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class culture.
The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as might be, to maintain the received standards and methods of culture intact are likewise characteristic of the archaic temperament and of the leisure-class theory of life.

The enjoyment and the bent derived from habitual contemplation of the life, ideals, speculations, and methods of consuming time and goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical antiquity, for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier", than what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace humanity in a modern community, that learning the content of which is an unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is by comparison "lower", "base", "ignoble"-- one even hears the epithet "sub-human" applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of mankind and of everyday life.
This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the humanities seems to be substantially sound.