During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in
the scope of college and university teaching. These changes have
in the main consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities
-- those branches of learning which are conceived to make for the
traditional "culture", character, tastes, and ideals -- by those
more matter-of-fact branches which make for civic and industrial
efficiency. To put the same thing in other words, those branches
of knowledge which make for efficiency (ultimately productive
efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground against those
branches which make for a heightened consumption or a lowered
industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
regime of status. 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.
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