ABSTRACT
The American system of higher education may be the finest in the world. It has also been emulated the world over. The reforming of liberal education presents one of the most complex intellectual and social challenges of modern life. Steps to reform liberal education over the past century were driven by imaginative responses to big social changes. The pressures that energized the general education movement did not spawn concrete curricula automatically. Many philosophies of education, past and present, pursue the goal of creating a special kind of person. Accounts of the earliest modes of liberal learning, those of ancient China, describe the goal of liberal education in this way: to form a man suited to govern by virtue of possessing wisdom, benevolence, loyalty, harmony, martial abilities, aesthetic skills, and knowledge of ritual proprieties. Peculiar to Chicago's involvement with liberal learning is that each of the principles just enumerated has been adopted at various points.
