In recent years, university education has changed considerably, adapting to the prevailing circumstances and proving itself an essential resource in the optimisation of the professional, social and cultural domains. In short, the changes experienced by university education have led to the achievement of quite significant results. However, at the same time we have also witnessed the emergence of certain misgivings about the nature of this education, above all in relation to the personal, ethical and civic development of today's student populace. This paper focuses on these concerns, and in so doing, it revisits a past in which essential philosophical ideas were being formulated about higher education, ideas that this paper argues are highly pertinent to current reality.