Technically, my education ended with my Ph.D. nearly 30 years ago. Yet spending the past three weeks at Oxford University with George Mason University students reminds me that education continues all our lives as we make sense of the world.

Most students think in pragmatic terms: An education is a ticket to a better job and a better life. Even on this basic level, education gives life some shape. But seeing education as a more complex marriage of thought and history, the coherent shape that emerges reveals necessary connections among science, the arts, language, history and politics. Each subject is part of the world’s shape, just as the continents, though separate, form the shape of a sphere.