Now what was the secret of its utility?  As I analyze my experience, I find it summed up very largely in two factors.  In the first place, I studied a set of subjects for which I had at the outset very little taste.  In studying agriculture, I had to master a certain amount of chemistry, physics, botany, and zooelogy, for each and every one of which I felt, at the outset, a distinct aversion and dislike.  A mastery of these subjects was essential to a realization of the purpose that I had in mind.  I was sure that I should never like them, and yet, as I kept at work, I gradually found myself losing that initial distaste.  First one and then another opened out its vista of truth and revelation before me, and almost before I was aware of it, I was enthusiastic over science.  It was a long time before I generalized that experience and drew its lesson, but the lesson, once learned, has helped me more even in the specific task of getting a living than anything else that came out of my school training.  That experience taught me, not only the necessity for doing disagreeable tasks,—­for attacking them hopefully and cheerfully,—­but it also taught me that disagreeable tasks, if attacked in the right way, and persisted in with patience, often become attractive in themselves.  Over and over again in meeting the situations of real life, I have been confronted with tasks that were initially distasteful.  Sometimes I have surrendered before them; but sometimes, too, that lesson has come back to me, and has inspired me to struggle on, and at no time has it disappointed me by the outcome.  I repeat that there is no technical knowledge that I have gained that compares for a moment with that ideal of patience and persistence.  When it comes to real, downright utility, measured by this inexorable standard of getting a living, let me commend to you the ideal of persistent effort.  All the knowledge that we can learn or teach will come to very little if this element is lacking.

Now this is very far from saying that the pursuit of really useful knowledge may not give this ideal just as effectively as the pursuit of knowledge that will never be used.  My point is simply this:  that beyond the immediate utility of the facts that we teach,—­indeed, basic and fundamental to this utility,—­is the utility of the ideals and standards that are derived from our school work.  Whatever we teach, these essential factors can be made to stand out in our work, and if our pupils acquire these we shall have done the basic and important thing in helping them to solve the problems of real life,—­and if our pupils do not acquire these, it will make little difference how intrinsically valuable may be the content of our instruction.  I feel like emphasizing this matter to-day, because there is in the air a notion that utility depends entirely upon the content of the curriculum.  Certainly the curriculum must be improved from this standpoint, but we are just now losing sight of the other equally important factor,—­that, after all, while both are essential, it is the spirit of teaching rather than the content of teaching that is basic and fundamental.