Introduction

Liberal education rests comfortably in a haze where it no longer calls us to commit to anything exemplary hard or heroic. If education is not to promote material success, what should it do? Must we lend any legitimacy to an older idea that education exists primarily to orm the inner man as well as to impart those all important skills for making a living? Or have we fallen so far short of this ideal that we cannot even spy its majestic peaks? We praise liberal education zealously but few of us know what it means. It has become grist for commencement addresses and high flown commentary expounding the true mission of our schools and universities. As with pornography, we think we know it when we see it