The significance of the foundations of education approach to teaching is apparent in the ideas of John Henry Newman, Karl Jaspers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Mortimer Adler. Newman maintained that there is a circle of knowledge and once this unity is ignored the result is distortion in the learners and in the knowledge. To retain the whole, the faculty and learners were required to subordinate both the part and the utilitarian to the whole and the liberal. Knowledge for its own sake governed both the unity of knowledge and the unity of the student grounded in the circle of knowledge. Jaspers grounded the priority of research and of teaching in the unity of knowledge, and he depended on two other factors to give life to the university: communication and institutionalization. Both the scientific approach and the unit of knowledge are essential in Jaspers' concern for the mission of the university. He suggested that each science forms its own whole and that technology should be recognized as significant as any profession. Ortega centered the mission of the university on the capability of the learner, and the criterion was the relationship of research and teaching. During the past decade Adler took the principles of the circle of learning, of the learning community, and of lifetime learning seriously in ordering the knowledge within the encyclopedia. The following principles of the university become evident in this analysis: knowledge is a unity; the pursuit of knowledge tends toward the unity of the student; the pursuit of knowledge is more demanding in an age of technology; the centering of the student within knowledge and the teacher is important; the community of learning is necessary; and research is a priority. (SW)