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There is another modern tendency in education, which is connected with democracy, but perhaps somewhat more open to question – I mean the tendency to make education useful rather than ornamental.

The connection of the ornamental with aristocracy has been set forth searchingly in Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class,
but it is only the educational aspect of this connection that concerns us.
In male education, the matter is bound up with the controversy between a classical and
a 'modern' education; in the education of girls, it is part of the conflict between the ideal of the 'gentlewoman', and the desire to train girls to be self-supporting.
But the whole educational problem, where women are concerned, has been distorted by the desire for sex equality: there has been an attempt to acquire the same education as that given to boys,
even where it was by no means good in itself.
Consequently women educators have aimed at giving to their girls such 'useless' knowledge as is given to boys of the same class,
and have been bitter opponents of the notion that some part of female education should be a technical training for motherhood.
These cross-currents make the tendency that I am considering in some respects less definite where women are concerned, though the decay of the ideal of the 'fine lady' is one of the most noteworthy examples of the tendency.
In order to avoid confusing the issue, I shall for the moment confine myself to male education.

女子は8割褒めて男子は8割叱る｢性差｣に着目した勉強http://businessinsider.jp/post-183098

Many separate controversies, in all of which other questions arise, are in part dependent upon our present question.
Should boys learn mainly classics or mainly science? Among other considerations, one is that the classics are ornamental and science is useful. Should education as soon as possible become technical instruction for some trade or profession?
Again the controversy between the useful and the ornamental is relevant; though not decisive. Should children be taught to enunciate correctly and to have pleasant manners, or are these merely relics of aristocracy? Is appreciation of art a thing of any value except in the artist? Should spelling be phonetic? All these and many other controversies are argued in part in terms of the controversy between the useful and the ornamental.
Nevertheless, I believe the whole controversy to be unreal. As soon as the terms are defined, it melts away.
If we interpret 'useful' broadly and 'ornamental' narrowly, the one side has it; in the contrary interpretations, the other side has it. In the widest and most correct sense of the word, an activity is 'useful' when it has good results.
And these results must be 'good' in some other sense than merely 'useful', or else we have no true definition. We cannot say that a useful activity is one which has useful results.
The essence of what is 'useful' is that it ministers to some result which is not merely useful. Sometimes a long chain of results is necessary before the final result is reached which can be called simply 'good'. A plough is useful because it breaks up the ground.
But breaking up the ground is not good on its own account; it is in turn merely useful because it enables seed to be sown. This is useful because it produces grain, which is useful because it produces bread, which is useful because it preserves life.

But life must be capable of some intrinsic value: if life were merely useful as a means to other life, it would not be useful at all. Life may be good or bad according to circumstances; it may therefore also be useful, when it is a means to good life.
Somewhere we must get beyond the chain of successive utilities, and find a peg from which the chain is to hang; if not, there is no real usefulness in any link of the chain. When 'useful' is defined in this way, there can be no question whether education should be useful.

Of course it should, since the process of educating is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But that is not quite what the advocates of utility in education have in mind.
What they are urging is that the result of education should be useful: put crudely,
they would say that an educated man is a man who knows how to make machines. If we ask what is the use of machines,
the answer is ultimately that they produce necessaries and comforts for the body – food, clothing, houses, etc.
Thus we find that the advocate of utility, in the sense in which his view is questionable, is a man who attaches intrinsic value only to physical satisfactions : the 'useful', for him, is that which helps us to gratify the needs and desires of the body.
When this is what is really meant, the advocate of utility is certainly in the wrong if he is enunciating an ultimate philosophy, though in a world where many people are starving he may be right as a politician, since the satisfaction of physical needs may be at the moment more urgent than anything else.