"Among all sorts of people and in all kinds of places, it has become the fashion to attack American education.  One criticism is that it upsets and disturbs young people.  The conception of education as a process of settling, or hardening, of the fixation of sound principles and righteous dogma in the youth of America, brings me at once to state my own view of university training.  It is that the purpose of higher education is to unsettle the minds of young men [and, presumably one may add, of young women], to widen their horizon, to inflame their intellects.  It is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians in any field.  It is to teach them to think, to think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves."

-Robert Maynard Hutchins (1930?)