With regard to students, it is held that sophistication is a virtuous quality that can be obtained as one of the residual effects of a university education. Students leaving university are assumed to have a sharper and broader edge than those who enter their respective occupations directly. Aside from the technical skills learned, we hope that students, upon graduation, will undergo a transformation of self – a transformation from the uneducated concept of self as center of the world and constructor of reality to a more fully mature, erudite self as a being amongst the world and an agent for positive change. As skills alone cannot guide one in this direction, faculties in the humanities make it their purview to draw from the lessons of the classics and the canonical literature of the humanities, which balances the vocation with the education. In the words of Jorge Dominguez, formerly of Harvard University: “A liberal education is what remains after you have forgotten the facts that you learned while becoming educated.” It is this which provides one with a level of sophistication.
The word comes from the Greek σοφιστής or sophist, a skillful man; σοφίζειν, to instruct; and σοφος, wise. It is cognate with the Latin word sapient. A sophist was (and still is) a captious reasoner; thus, he is sly, cunning, wily, slick – the idea being artful or skillful “reasoning-around” – compare our modern English use of “wise” as in wise-guy or smart-ass. (A wiseacre is really a “wise-sayer” – wijs-segger in the old tongue and taken from the Dutch.) The negative nuance in “sophist” is best known from Socrates’ disparagement of them and the unscrupulous means by which they held persuasion to be of greater importance than the truth of an issue. This range of meaning from a positive to negative nuance of SOPH- by the Greeks is indicative of various cultures’ estimation of just how much knowledge tends to corruption. The instrument necessary to harness and exercise control over one’s application of his knowledge can be seen to be something apart from sophistication as understood; there is something more to it.