'What a wonderful world it would be . . .'

'Now there is a case to be made for essential interventions in situations where justice demands it. Historically, the advent of free third-level education was just such a necessary intervention, allowing young people of ability from ordinary families to compete on more or less level terms with the sons and daughters of those more privileged. The point here, of course, is that it represented a levelling upwards—it represented the unchaining of ability, not a restriction of it.'

I wrote the above passage some ten or eleven mailings ago, and the important word in it at the time of writing, and also the most deliberate word, was 'ability'. The passage was written in full awareness of the background to the recent 'revelations' concerning grade inflation in the education system. In fact, the term 'revelation' is something of a misnomer—for there can have been nobody of any degree of commonsense that could not see the true situation without having to wait for the matter to be raised (and then denied) by Batt O'Keefe.

An indication of the kind of age we live in is the increasing use of buzz-words or buzz-phrases. The 'smart economy' is one such. What is this smart economy? I don't know. Does anyone know? At the same time, while I mightn't know what the term means, I certainly know what it is. It is one of those bullshit terms beloved of bluffers, used to hide their own ignorance, and at the same time to cow everyone else into silence.

Another such term is 'high-end'—as in 'high-end jobs' etc. The theory is that while we may be losing low-end, unskilled jobs to the cheaper economies, we will compensate for this by the creation of high-end ones (it is all tied in, in one great Gordian Knot, with the idea of the 'smart economy'). The problem is, of course, that if we want high-end jobs, we need to have high-end people capable of filling them. And that, it seems, is the thing that is more or less missing.

On the face of it, the matter of the education system and what's wrong with it seems capable of a fairly simple analysis. But that would be a totally wrong view. It is a highly complex problem, leading in all sorts of directions, so that if one was to follow them all, it would take a book not a mailing. But there are certain main points that are unavoidable.

The first is that there are too many people going on to university. Or, to be precise, too many people going to university who shouldn't be going. I remember a philosophy lecturer at an Irish university, some five years ago, telling of a first-year student who handed in an essay totally free of punctuation and capital letters—just one long unbroken screed, like something out of James Joyce. When she criticised the student for her presentation (both the lecturer and the student were female), the latter reacted with outrage—this was the way she had always done things and nobody had ever complained of it up until now.

The mere fact of wanting to go to university should not be sufficient to get one a place there. One should also need display an aptitude for it. Having a child at university is often a modern form of the older Irish ambition to have a priest in the family—irrespective of the matter of vocation or otherwise. It is a matter primarily of social status. And just as likely to end up badly—certainly from the point of view of society.

Of course there are practical reasons for the race to third-level education, too. As we can see at the moment, in times of economic hardship it is often seen as a preferable option to the dole. And in a world where population is accelerating at the same time as technologyis diminishing the role played by labour in production, the temptation to park a portion of one's surplus population—off balance-sheet, as it were—in third-level education must seem irresistable to most governments. The fact that it also tends to diminish the overall quality of the end-product is something that is usually ignored.

Nowadays it is—or at least used to be before the recession—possible, no matter how bad your results, to get a place on a third-level course somewhere. The gap in Britain between the best and the worst degree-issuing institutions is absolutely enormous, with those on the bottom tier more akin to McDonald's 'Hamburger University' than anything else. At the same time, students do come out of such places with degrees—degrees that in terms of certifying intellectual or professional competence are generally worse than useless.

In such a situation, statistics showing an ever upwards rise in academic standards tend to be at best misleading. The fact is, as employers in Britain have long since recognised, it is no longer the face value of the degree that counts, but rather the quality of the issuing institution.

The situation has also been exacerbated by what seems to be a fundamental assumption of the equality brigade—that if you haven't gone to university you have somehow been discriminated against. If you are a plumber or a welder or work on the buildings or in a call centre, it is simply because you have been denied the chance to be something implicitly 'better'.

This is the thinking that underlies the current situation in Britain (which as usual is further down the road than Ireland in this regard) where the whole education debate and practice has descended to a form of class warfare. The fundamental criterion for university entry under New Labour is socio-economic background—the more deprived your background, the greater your chance of getting a college place, or at least the place of your choice. Laudable from the point of view of social justice; yet crazy to the extent that it relegates, as often it seems to do, ability to the status of an also ran.

Yet there is also a certain rationale to the New Labour position, there being no doubt that the middle classes have an edge over the run of working-class and poorer candidates when it comes to interviews and aptitude tests etc. Now this has nothing to do with native ability or intelligence, such things not being confined to any one part of the population. On a level playing pitch, the best, irrespective of class, will still rise to the top. But the fact is that once one enters into the field of mass social engineering, as New Labour is currently doing, one is no longer necessarily dealing with the best but with the average, or even the less than average. And in this situation the middle classes have a definite advantage.

Ability or intelligence isn't capped at birth; it is open to further nurturing and development, or at least honing, depending on the environment one is raised in, the schools one attends etc. And as such it is possible to see how the children (even the average ones) of the educated middle class have an advantage when it comes to presenting themselves for university admissions, even if only in the matter of confidence and expectation. And also, too, how the academic environment is likely to prove much more amenable to them.

By contrast, the student from the lower socio-economic background, unless he is unusually lucky, is unlikely to enjoy the same cultural background in growing up. Education may compensate to some extent, but only incompletely. Yet it may still compensate . . . except that the British state education system is—to an extent that the Irish one isn't quite yet—in a total mess.

When I was young there was something called the Primary Certificate, which you sat around the age of twelve, and which certified your competency in the three Rs. The British equivalent was, I think, the 11 Plus. Yet the situation now is that employers in Britain are often having to test applicants with university degrees for basic literacy and numeracy.

How and why has this happened? No doubt there are different reasons involved. But one thing is certain, a major, if not the major, factor was the development of a liberal theory-down approach. Rather like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams—Build it and they'll come!—the buzz phrase notionally was one of 'Think it and it must be true!' If you could write something down on paper, and it seemed to be logical, then it must be feasible—the same mindset as underlay the developments in financial theory that helped cause the current economic collapse. Inspired by the liberal ideology of unrestrained equality, and ultimately by a creeping Marxism, all the old tried and tested ways of doing things in education were scrapped in favour of fashionable new theories—theories that fundamentally didn't work anywhere except on paper.

The fact is that, in education, more is often less. If the purpose of university education is to produce and train an intellectual and professional elite then entrance to it must of necessity, and in terms of ability, be restrictive. If, instead, its main role is to be one of social engineering then access must needs be more broadly based, and involve an inevitable deterioration in standards.

But, of course, in a certain sense the situation hasn't really changed. In a certain sense, it has proved self-correcting. We have seen how the emphasis has changed from the simple fact of having a degree to the question of what college the degree is from. Thus, in an informal way, old standards are being more or less maintained. But even that is progressively coming under fire, with New Labour targetting more and more the entry policies of the premier league universities. And this is not something I necessarily disagree with—in fact it is arguably a praiseworthy policy—so long as it does not involve any fudge in the matter of intellect and ability.

There is a further point, already briefly touched on—an important point—that time and the length of this mailing prevent me from dealing with. I will return to it next day.