Alan Ryan: The Americans have got it right

The Labour government of 1929-31 destroyed itself and damaged the British economy by hanging on to the Gold Standard. On forming his "National" government, Ramsay Macdonald was astonished to find that you could abandon the Gold Standard – so the government did, and the economy began to recover. Education policy has got itself stuck on a "gold standard" of A-levels, and now governments are fussing about degree standards. It's time it stopped.

What are universities for? These days, mostly to certify the employability of graduates. The toughest universities produce the best-paid graduates, not because of what they teach, but because it takes hard work and concentration to thrive. Second, they breed the next generation of researchers, which is mostly a postgraduate enterprise, of which only a taste can be given much sooner.

Third, they give students a chance to discover what humanity has been up to for the past several millennia and to stock their minds with the skills and knowledge to enable them to make sense of their lives. The last aim – a decent liberal education – needs to have its foundations laid early. At present it's an aim that seems wholly neglected.

We should rethink undergraduate education. One thing the English might do is to look north or west for inspiration. It's not true that most American students do liberal arts degrees; they do at the top-end institutions. Statistically speaking most do some variant on business studies. But wherever they are, Americans are given a good deal of general education before they start their major. The transformation of British secondary education over the past 30 years means that British students need a lot more general education too.

Far from being at odds with vocational education, general education helps it; narrowly vocational skills get out of date fast, and are best learned on the job. The broader ability to think analytically – especially learning to be unfrightened of statistics and graphs – doesn't date; it improves with use, and it is in short supply. It's an ability best acquired by trying it out on historical, political and economic data. This isn't a matter of mugging up enough to win at Trivial Pursuit, but of acquiring a feeling for evidence and proof.

Because not everyone wants to be a hot-shot management consultant, students need "cultural literacy". It's partly a question of intellectual freedom. People who cannot give a coherent account of what they think or feel are at the mercy of whatever emotions sweep through their minds and whatever half-digested facts or fictions come with them. The best way to gain the ability to think cogently is to write a lot, and on different subjects: historical, literary, philosophical.

The blight of "functional illiteracy" is well known. About a quarter of young people leave school unable to read a map or an instruction manual. But it is less often remarked that something like a quarter of undergraduates is functionally illiterate at a different level: unable to give a critical response to plays, poetry and music, unable to locate major events and people in their historical and geographical contexts. Because they have so little pre-existing material to work with, they have nothing much to extrapolate from – not, for instance, enough grasp of the French Revolution to imagine why Trotsky thought it was a model for the Russian Revolution, or why the American Revolution wasn't one (either a model or a revolution in the modern sense).

When 5 per cent of the age group went to university after an education in which history and languages wereprominent, we could hope that cultural literacy – though not numeracy or science – had been taken care of, and the old-style single honours degree would do the rest. Now, we are in mid-Atlantic, and have to think again. The minimum payoff from taking general education seriously would be fewer employers complaining that graduates can't write a coherent letter of application. But, at a more exalted level, it would mean more students feeling that they had had an education that was genuinely "higher" rather than merely "tertiary."

The writer is warden of New College, Oxford and is on a year's sabbatical at Stanford University, California

education@independent.co.uk