ABSTRACT
The study of higher education is perplexed by two unanswerable questions: what is it for? and how do we know when it has succeeded? In contemporary industrial democracies, this consensus appears indeterminate and permissive. We turn to empirical inquiry not only to see how, in a given context, to realize an aim, but often to discover the aim itself-as, in everyday life, we redefine ethical principles in the light of experience. Higher education is distinguished from training, not by its subject matter, but by the kind of purpose to which it seeks to make an understanding of the subject relevant. It trains an ability to perceive relationships which afford understanding in many contexts. The principles, by which perception is organized, are taught at a level of abstraction from the context in which they are demonstrated which enable them to be generalized.
