Supplement their education with something more important—namely, knowledge and understanding

What's wrong with our universities? by James Piereson.

Of course, it is possible that no conceivable test can accurately measure what students should really learn during their college years. The purpose of higher education, after all, is not to train students in the basic skills of reasoning and writing but to take students who already have them and supplement their education with something more important—namely, knowledge and understanding. The campaign to turn colleges into glorified high schools has been as misguided as the effort to turn the humanities into a science. It is not possible to educate students in something called “critical thinking” in the absence of a foundation of knowledge. Students who have taken the trouble to fortify themselves with knowledge will naturally develop the capacities both to criticize and to affirm, and to understand the difference between the two. An education in the liberal arts, rightly understood, is one means by which educators in the past sought to engage students in the search for knowledge and understanding. Whatever the weaknesses of that approach, academic leaders have yet to find an effective substitute for it.