The social center

by Woodrow Wilson

Means to Liberal Education

I once made this statement that a university was intended to make young people just as unlike their fathers as possible. By which I do not mean anything disrespectful to their fathers, but merely this, by the time a man is old enough to have children in college, his point of view is apt to have become so specialized that they would better be taken away from him and put in a place where their views of life will be regeneralized and they will be disconnected from the family and connected with the world. That, I understand to be the function of education, of the liberal education.

Now a kind of liberal education must underlie every wholesome political and social process, the kind of liberal education which connects a man’s feeling and his comprehension with the general run of mankind, which disconnects him from the special interests and marries his thought to the common interests of great communities and of great cities and of great states and of great nations, and, if possible, with that brotherhood of man that transcends the boundaries of nations themselves.

Those are the horizons to my mind of this social center movement, that they are going to unite the feelings and clarify the comprehension of communities, of bodies of men who draw together in conference.