This project examines the social construction of the educated person. It describes and analyzes the different historical contexts and institutionalized views of persons and how these affect shifts in the relationships students are to have with knowledge. These changes in the curriculum are mediated by the broader cultural framework, which provides the legitimate blueprints and institutionalized rules that define what it means to be university, knowledge, and the individual. By utilizing quantitative and qualitative methods, I show how the university curriculum constitutes a different type of student and a different type of an educated person, shifting from one constituted by a mastery of knowledge, then by desires, and in the contemporary period, by interests and goals. Broad changes in the curriculum are understudied and the aim of this research is to fill this gap by focusing on a greatly taken-for-granted component of the curriculum--choice--by empirically studying the changes in the curriculum over time and sociologically analyzing a key relationship within the curriculum between the student and knowledge. I examine what it means to be educated as part of the social construction of personhood and its increasingly dominant form of the individual. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]