Now if this ideal of persistent effort is the most useful thing that can come out of education, what is the next most useful?  Again, as I analyze what I obtained from my own education, it seems to me that, next to learning that disagreeable tasks are often well worth doing, the factor that has helped me most in getting a living has been the method of solving the situations that confronted me.  After all, if we simply have the ideal of resolute and aggressive and persistent attack, we may struggle indefinitely without much result.  All problems of life involve certain common factors.  The essential difference between the educated and the uneducated man, if we grant each an equal measure of pluck, persistence, and endurance, lies in the superior ability of the educated man to analyze his problem effectively and to proceed intelligently rather than blindly to its solution.  I maintain that education should give a man this ideal of attacking any problem; furthermore I maintain that the education of the present day, in spite of the anathemas that are hurled against it, is doing this in richer measure than it has ever been done before.  But there is no reason why we should not do it in still greater measure.

I once knew two men who were in the business of raising fruit for commercial purposes.  Each had a large orchard which he operated according to conventional methods and which netted him a comfortable income.  One of these men was a man of narrow education:  the other a man of liberal education, although his training had not been directed in any way toward the problems of horticulture.  The orchards had borne exceptionally well for several years, but one season, when the fruit looked especially promising, a period of wet, muggy weather came along just before the picking season, and one morning both these men went out into their orchards, to find the fruit very badly “specked.”  Now the conventional thing to do in such cases was well known to both men.  Each had picked up a good deal of technical information about caring for fruit, and each did the same thing in meeting this situation.  He got out his spraying outfit, prepared some Bordeaux mixture, and set vigorously at work with his pumps.  So far as persistence and enterprise went, both men stood on an equal footing.  But it happened that this was an unusual and not a conventional situation.  The spraying did not alleviate the condition.  The corruption spread through the trees like wildfire, and seemed to thrive on copper sulphate rather than succumb to its corrosive influence.

Now this was where the difference in training showed itself.  The orchardist who worked by rule of thumb, when he found that his rule did not work, gave up the fight and spent his time sitting on his front porch bemoaning his luck.  The other set diligently at work to analyze the situation.  His education had not taught him anything about the characteristics of parasitic fungi, for parasitic fungi were not very