Traditional notions of education assumed that students were raw material in need of training which would shape them into adult members of society by imparting skills and knowledge necessary for fitting in to the larger social framework that is the adult world. This vision was not simply technical: liberal arts education also saw the teaching of the great classics of culture—literature, art, music, philosophy—as shaping the student’s understanding of what it means to be human. To be educated was to be transformed by exposure to a range of ideas, whether one agreed with them or not.
