Poet, critic, and inspector of schools. He deeply believed in the value of what he called "culture," defined as the transforming experience of the best human works and thoughts from the past. Through an education that immerses us in the accumulated wisdom of the humanities and especially of literature, the human race pursues "total perfection" and "the passion for sweetness and light." Arnold also introduced the term "philistine" to describe the middle class, a term that later came to mean someone who is unfamiliar with or rejects "culture."