Another national trait which influences our education is our utilitarianism. I do not use this term in the sense that it was used by those philosophers who held the principle of the Greatest Happiness. I refer to that in us which is spoken of as “Yankee shrewdness.” Except in politics and religion, we are a sensible people. And by sensible I mean--and most Americans would agree--practical. We can be very efficient when we wish to,--that is, when there is anything to gain by it. We are straightforward, and except in matters concerning which we prefer to deceive ourselves, not easily taken in. Whatever we profess, we are born pragmatists. Our first question about anything is ‘what good is it’, that is, what use is it? We demand results and we get them. We get things done because our philosophy of life is one of action, and our prevailing ethical standard is one of service. In the solution of a practical problem, and most problems to which we give our attention are practical, we pride ourselves on our directness. We come to the point. We dispense with the unnecessary, the ornamental, the traditional. It is a valuable trait. But things sometimes have meanings other than that of usefulness. There are values which can not be measured in terms of money or personal advantage, or of time lost or gained, or of industrial efficiency. Health for instance is good not merely because the healthy man can do more work; it is good for its own sake. Yet people are frequently advised to guard their health for strictly economic reasons, and practical people have the habit of showing us the cost of disease, presenting statistics of labor-time lost, estimating the loss to the community as so many thousands of dollars annually. I have known people to take a like utilitarian view of human relationships, making friends for the sake of commercial and social advancement, furnishing their houses, selecting their motor cars and even their clothes with the view to keeping up their credit at the bank. Many a man openly says that he belongs to certain clubs, and sometimes one even joins a church, for business reasons. How much the practical man misses is evident from the fact that it never occurs to him that there are other reasons for doing these things. Practical men love to philosophize about the value of education. When I was a student I once rode up to the college with a farmer who was passing the campus on his way home from town. He informed me in no uncertain terms that he had no use for that institution. It irritated him to see all those “young loafers” wasting their time learning Latin and Greek and lawn tennis. Not one of them, not even the faculty, knew how to do anything; he had recently tested them out. He had asked the professor of Greek how many feet of lumber could be sawed from a log twenty-three inches in diameter and twenty feet long, and the professor did not know.