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.
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