The place of these ideals is taken by a dilettantism which displays itself in two forms,--in individualism and in sciolism. The first, a shallow type of individualism, is directed by the theory that a student’s peculiar tastes are the ultimate criteria by which he should make his judgments, and that he must be seduced into a liking for literature by the application of whatever literary candy pleases his palate. The thought that a man should be somewhat adapted to his reading, and not his reading to him, is altogether alien to this theory, and the existence of common social ideals, which, if they are not present in the student, should be developed, is not suspected by its propounders. It is to the adoption of this principle by many secondary-school teachers that we owe the presence in our colleges of the campus radicals who curse their fates and the restraints prohibiting them from living their own lives. The ordinary progress of students guided by such principles is to begin easily with something on the level, say, of Kipling, and gradually to work up to the high seriousness of the poetry of Oscar Wilde. The popularity and influence of the sort of contemporary literature which I have mentioned may be very well explained, I think, by the existence of this view in the minds of many of our educators. The sciolism which is the second form of our literary dilettantism,--a shallowness which investigates only the superficialities of things, which delights in accepted definitions and phrases,--is largely involved in the manner in which our times have forsaken the study of the classics, as well as of the other literatures and other subjects without which the study of no one literature can be complete. No teacher of science would admit to his classes students unversed in mathematics; he would say that science without some mathematical knowledge was an impossibility. Now, a knowledge of the literature and customs of classical antiquity is just as necessary to the student of a modern literature as a mathematical knowledge is to the student of science. The teacher of literature, however, who demanded from his students this indispensable knowledge, would soon lecture to empty halls. Popular opinion, as reflected by those who are to be taught, is altogether on the side of those “other matters, far too many,” which have been crowded into education.