On the higher, classical plane of
learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant aim becomes
the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
classes -- or of an incipient leisure class -- for the
consumption of goods, material and immaterial, according to a
conventionally accepted, reputable scope and method. This happy
issue has commonly been the fate of schools founded by "friends
of the people" for the aid of struggling young men, and where
this transition is made in good form there is commonly, if not
invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic life in the
schools.
In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way
best at home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the
"humanities". This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than
anywhere else, in the life-history of the American colleges and
universities of recent growth. There may be many exceptions from
the rule, especially among those schools which have been founded
by the typically reputable and ritualistic churches, and which,
therefore, started on the conservative and classical plane or
reached the classical position by a short-cut; but the general
rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer American
communities during the present century has been that so long as
the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils
has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and
precarious acceptance in the scheme of college life.
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