ABSTRACT
In all literate societies there have been institutions of higher education to cultivate and transmit intellectual tradition at its highest level. The Academy of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle, and the higher schools in China, India, and among Arabs and Jews all educated advanced students who went to study with teachers famous for their knowledge and originality of thought. Although much discussion of specialized practical higher education took place in eighteenth-century Europe, actual experiments of this kind were few and not systematically executed. The only specialized studies at the universities were in law, theology, and medicine, and even those were not very specialized. It was important, of course, for a theologian to know Greek and Latin, and for a lawyer to know Latin. The arbiter to which the conflicting groups addressed themselves everywhere was the government, which had the authority to change the system of higher education.
