ABSTRACT
From its early association with the study of Latin and Greek, humanism has gradually been expanded to the study of language generally as a distinctive possession of human beings, and with the arts—music, painting, sculpture, poetry—as the highest forms of expression by which human beings convey their experience and their aspirations. These, it turns out, are the very subjects that have suffered the steepest decline in the American school curriculum during the course of the twentieth century, a decline which, if continued, will at best make artistic expression and appreciation the province of a handful of sensitive souls whose mission it will be to preserve the higher culture and to protect it from degradation by the mob. It is difficult if not impossible to distill from his curriculum catalog any body of studies that could be deemed more valuable than any other.
