Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness. - Leo Strauss

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions

Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.