One idea of using Lisp is to learn new thinking styles for programming. Thinking styles are not fixed. For example an early hurdle in programming / computer science is recursion. Lisp gave the teachers a tool to teach thinking of software development in terms of programming with recursive functions&datastructures, starting with linked lists and operations for it...

Unfortunately students often got the impression that Lisp is only good for learning new ways of thinking (in combination with a theory of recursive functions) and not for actual software development.