The farmer’s point of view is now that of many modern institutions of learning. Educators are determined to give people the knowledge they need for success in life and work. Courses are offered in scenario writing, millinery, salesmanship. Whether courses are anywhere offered in paper hanging--with credit toward the bachelor’s degree, I do not know. But it is held that as thinking is really part of acting, only that knowledge is real which can be put in operation. There is a truth in this statement if one takes a sufficiently broad view of activity. But the tendency is to make an easy and crude distinction between knowledge which is useful, and that which is merely “ornamental.” This distinction does not always hold. Knowledge may be like art, it may have values which are more than use or ornamentation. Dr. Horace Kallen divides values into economic values and æsthetic values. Economic goods are those which are valuable because they are the means of getting some good other than themselves. Aesthetic goods are those which have value in themselves. Art is excellence. Education is the art of making living itself an art. It is the achievement of human excellence; it transcends both the useful and the ornamental. It is a way of life, just as truly as the religious life is a way of life, or the moral life, or the single life. People motivated by a narrow utilitarianism do not really desire education. They are quite content with a vulgar substitute--if it pays. Education does not transform them; they tend to transform it after their own likeness. That many are seeking “education” from such motives is evident. One has only to study the advertising pages of the popular magazines to note the kind of appeal that is made to induce the ambitious to enroll in certain correspondence schools. The prospective student is given the promise that if he will subscribe for certain courses he may some day sit in the boss’s chair, and associate with the big men at the top who do real things. Usually there is an alluring picture of these big men at their desks, thinking great ideas; a picture which gives about the same notion of the lives of the successful as one sees in the motion pictures. Sometimes the picture is of two men one on either side of the manager’s desk. One stands meekly, hat in hand, dressed as a laborer. On his face are the marks of sorrow, humility, hunger. The other man has the look of the typical “go-getter.” The latter is seated; he is evidently giving an order. Such a picture is not intended to be a comment upon the inequalities of our industrial system. The reader is informed that both men started at the bottom, that one improved his mind and his opportunities, the other’s is a wasted life.