The instruction that students receive as part of their university education has at least two purposes. One of them is that of equipping them with the knowledge and abilities that are needed for domain-specific purposes in their future professions. Thus, the medical school aims to equip students with the knowledge and abilities that doctors need in their profession and a graduate program in linguistics aims to equip students with what a professional linguist needs. The other goal is that of equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and abilities that any educated person would require, independently of their particular professions. Both these considerations are important in the formulation of the goals of university education.

I will use the term professional education to refer to the specialized education that prepares students to become successful lawyers, doctors, engineers, physicists, biologists, psychologists, historians, and literary critics. For want of a better option, I will use the term liberal education to denote those aspects of education that do not aim at any particular specialization, but help lawyers, doctors, engineers, physicists, biologists, philosophers, and historians become educated people.² The reflections that follow are concerned with liberal education. The question that I wish to address is "What should liberal education aim at?" This amounts to asking "Who is an educated person?" An alternative way of formulating the question would be "What are the ingredients whose absence would result in diminished educatedness?"