Is the Renaissance scholar dead?

Adrian Monk and AC Grayling set out their arguments before tonight's live public debate
Adrian Monk and AC Grayling
Tuesday April 8, 2008

Guardian
Yes

What do we know about the world since the Renaissance? Almost every single forward movement in advancing the position of humankind has come from science, technology and business. James Watt developed the steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution in a workshop at Glasgow University. His partnership with Matthew Boulton made it a commercial success.

Where will the advances that take us forward in this century come from? Will they emerge from study of the 19th-century novel, or being able to translate Hesiod, or from theology (I'm open to bets)? You know the answer, and yet we continue to subsidise 30% of our undergraduates to study these subjects in universities. Are we nuts?

We're producing graduates who, far from being Renaissance scholars, wouldn't be able to figure out a problem posed by a Renaissance mathematician. A university system that allows people to indulge in academic entertainment and then awards them a degree doesn't deserve public money. A free sudoku booklet for school leavers would be a better use of our taxes.

So what should we do about it? The employment market has already discounted degrees that aren't relevant to business. Male arts graduates can expect to be worse off over their lifetime after paying for the kind of knowledge the economy doesn't care about.

Do we need another government initiative for this to sink in? Or do we need prospective students to wake up and smell the coffee on job prospects before they end up brewing it for a living?

I'm not suggesting that universities open departments of barista studies or call-centre etiquette. Far from it. Education in subjects that will boost the economy doesn't need to mean students ordering from a menu provided by local employers, allowing them to outsource their training budgets to universities.

Instead it means giving graduates the ability to excel in the subjects we know will feed an information-based, technology-driven global economy. We may not know exactly what those are, but we can be damn sure they are not liberal arts and humanities subjects.

If you don't believe me, a history grad, then take the word of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: "Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don't miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticised view of liberal arts broadening your horizons."

Andreessen is right. Even in a field like mine, journalism, the future is being shaped by graduates like Adrian Holovaty, who have developed programming languages and websites that aggregate information in ways traditional news providers could never dream of.

And yet, all too often universities are happy to pile on vocational-sounding courses while pandering to popular fads. In journalism, there are more than 150 courses available for an industry that has precious few job openings.

If you think it's just journalism, look at the CSI effect. Last year, Ucas had nearly 250 forensic science courses on its books, with nearly 1,700 students enrolled. Will those graduates find work in a profession with just over 2,500 registered practitioners?

I'm not suggesting we shut down English departments and forensic science degrees en masse. Let them flourish if they provide an opportunity to study as a leisure activity. The growth of genealogy demonstrates the public appetite for recreational learning in areas that universities barely support. By all means let people study history, the classics, novels, the media. But let them do it in their spare time - not as a state-sponsored, loan-financed languor.

When mathematics, which underpins almost every achievement in our civilisation, is the 20th most popular subject at university, you can see that Renaissance scholars might look at us with something like disgust. If we really want to maintain and improve our position in the world, we need to educate more technically skilled graduates, and send out into the world economy more people able to see sophisticated opportunities and take advantage of them, both intellectually and commercially.

· Professor Adrian Monck is head of journalism and publishing at the City University

No

We have come so far down the trail of thinking that people go to school in order to become foot-soldiers in the economic battle, as if paid employment were the sole meaning of life, that we scarcely understand what Aristotle meant by saying "we educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure". In contrast to this remarkable view, today's dull-witted, pedestrian, pragmatic view seems to be that the educational minimum must be whatever is enough in the way of literacy and numeracy to operate a check-out till. That was what a recent secretary of state for education and hammer of the classics, the alauricular (I bet he does not know what that means) Charles Clarke, publicly thought.

Not that I agree with the apparent implication of Aristotle's remark that a noble use of our leisure is the only reason for education. I think that, in addition, education makes better workers, better voters, more thoughtful, informed, engaged and therefore responsible citizens, healthier and happier people, and a more mature, flourishing, open and progressive society. All these benefits do not accrue from limiting education to equipping people with functional skills adapted to the eight hours a day they are destined to spend at the economic coalface. It comes from drawing out (e-ducare, Mr Clarke) their capacity for reflection, from helping them to develop skills of inquiry and criticism, allowing them to recognise what they need to know, to find it out, to evaluate it critically, and to apply it.

Moreover, a true education provides people with a broad knowledge of culture and history, enabling them to appreciate the amenities of civilised life, to understand what they encounter in their experience as citizens of the world, and to relate with greater insight and generosity to others. Like any appetite, the appetite for finding out, and thinking about what is learned, grows by feeding; and with the nourishment it provides, come other goods of mind and heart.

These are admittedly utopian aspirations for education, but they are only so because we fail ourselves in two important ways in our expectations and what as a society we are prepared to grant ourselves. The first is that our mass education system exists almost exclusively for people in the first two decades of life, and during them we seek to download a national minimum curriculum into heads, in step-rank fashion, each age cohort passing uniformly through the sausage machine to a quantifiable outcome. The resulting pressure for aiming at common denominators is inexorable, and as numbers increase and budgets erode, expectations follow the latter.

The second is that we think education stops around the end of the second decade, and that people will then get on with the next stage of conformity, as both cogs in the wealth-production machine and consumers of its outputs. But education should be a lifelong endeavour. When it is, it is richly satisfying and keeps minds fresh and flexible, and maintains interest in the possibilities of the world. By one of those incomprehensible acts of stupidity of which governments are so frequently capable, our own has decided no longer to fund "equal or lower qualifications" in higher education, meaning that if you have a bachelor's degree in English literature and after 20 years in the workplace wish to study for one in computing or nursing, the government will not fund it. So much for the tens of thousands of people who, part-time, continue with or return to higher education to extend and refresh themselves by taking up new subjects and opening new horizons.

There are those - surely, in other countries and times only? - who would like most in the population to be drones, not too questioning or well-informed, not too apt to criticise, and easily persuadable about things, especially at election times when a few promises about tax cuts and the like can do away with the need to ask people to think (in this case, who to vote for). The reason why such a reductive and manipulative view is wrong is precisely the reason why a broad liberal education, an education for life and not just for work, matters.

Mr Clarke: alauricular means "wing-eared".

· AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

The debate will take place tonight, and will also include Simon Woodroffe and Stephen Bayley. This is one of the Rethink public debates on the future of education hosted by the thinktank Agora and the Guardian. For details and to book tickets go to www.agora-education.org