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Purpose – Liberal education should consist of a healthy dynamic of mastering and transcending received traditions. This paper aims to discuss this point.Design/methodology/approach – This article discusses the inherent tension between the concepts of “liberal” and “education,” where “education” involves imparting conventional knowledge and “liberal” involves freeing the mind from it.Findings – With the rise of the social sciences and the maturation of the baby-boomers, higher education in the twentieth century gained a general bias against traditional knowledge. This bias is reflected in higher education becoming more jobs oriented, more ideological, and relativistic in values.Practical implications – Higher education should consist of greater integration of historical aspects of education pushed aside in the twentieth-century while continuing its transformation through new scientific research, making twenty-first century education more genuinely liberal.Originality/value – The required transformation will be difficult for many baby-boomers now in positions of authority in higher education who rejected conventional knowledge in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]