Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

Hutchins contrasts utilitarian or merely entertaining schooling with an older ideal of liberal education. The point is not to produce compliant citizens, keep students pleasantly occupied, or train narrow specialists, but to provoke intellectual restlessness: to challenge assumptions, expand the range of what students can imagine and understand, and kindle a durable appetite for inquiry. “Teach them to think straight” underscores disciplined reasoning—clarity, logic, and intellectual honesty—while “if possible” adds a characteristic note of irony and humility about how difficult genuine education is. The quote encapsulates Hutchins’s Great Books-era conviction that education should form independent minds rather than simply supply marketable skills.