Contract and connive

Two new books out this month - from the left and the right - warn that higher education must act now to shore up its foundations before it is overwhelmed by a tide of ill-prepared students and devalued degrees. Melanie Phillips identifies a deadly combination of 'trendy' ideology and market forces.

The political battles in education are largely fought out over the schools. It is generally assumed that there is no real problem with Britain's high-fliers who get to university. This is a delusion. In my book, All Must Have Prizes, I lay out the flight from literacy and knowledge which has taken place throughout the system, from nursery classes to degree courses.

A number of university teachers described in dismaying detail the extent of the problem. They said that although undergraduates were arriving at university with record numbers of A grades at A level, more and more were not only unable to do the work expected of them but had failed to master basics which would once have been taught to 12-year-olds as a matter of routine. It is not just that university students can no longer spell or punctuate. In some subjects taught at degree level, the gaps in students' knowledge are so fundamental that dons who can scarcely believe the evidence of their own eyes have had to dilute or extend their degree courses just to cope.

In modern languages, for example, the obsessive prejudice displayed in many state and independent schools against the teaching of grammar has meant that when they get to university, many students have such a poor grasp of language they cannot even translate simple sentences correctly, let alone read texts in the original. German tutors at universities such as Surrey, East Anglia and Oxford reported that many students had no knowledge of German word order or word endings, and could not translate even very simple sentences, such as "He has a bad teacher" and "He is a bad teacher". In 1993, 31 out of 36 first-year students at Surrey could not write the latter sentence in German.

These tutors reported that students appeared quite unable to extrapolate general rules from individual phrases. "Phrases seem to exist only in their own right," said Derek McCulloch, who teaches German at Surrey University. "One group revealed that hardly any students had been taught the perfect tense of verbs such as 'to be able' or 'to want'. And the subjunctive was played down as somewhere between an unnecessary complication and a total irrelevance. The students say accuracy doesn't matter as long as you can be understood."

Similar problems have beset degree courses in mathematics, largely because of the teachers of education. According to Peter Saunders, professor of maths at King's College, London, there is now a fundamental disagreement about what the subject actually is. "It's the maths education people who created the problem and won't admit it," he said. "They think maths is about investigation and we think it's about proof. They think proof, or axioms, isn't very important. When challenged, the maths education people say most children never understood proof anyway. And now I've interviewed someone for a post as a maths education lecturer who had never even heard of a proof."

Children lack manipulative skills in algebra, said Saunders. "They're taught a bit of algebra but maths is like football: they've got to practise. There's a feeling that if you ask a kid to do something, that's enough, that practice is drudgery. There's this fear of boring the children. But that's a challenge for the teacher. The other thing they can't do is solve problems. The way the work is set out they're never asked to solve a problem. Exams now require pupils to show this and show that and they get marks for everything they can do. Our students throw equals signs around like no one's business. They have no idea any more what they mean."

The underlying reason for these developments is that the educational world, heavily influenced by other profound currents of thinking which have all conspired to undermine every form of external authority, decided in its wisdom that no child should be allowed to fail. So no rules of language, for example, were to be taught; after all, if no rules were taught, no child could fail to learn them. Nothing was to be difficult; everything in the education garden was to be fun. Such thinking imposed, through the most doctrinaire means possible, an equality of ignorance and under-achievement.

But how does one explain, then, the ever-rising public examination successes and the flow of students through degree courses? The answer appears to be a growing corruption of the system caused by a deadly combination of educational ideology and crude market forces. It is a complex picture, involving a continuous decline in what exam papers actually expect pupils to achieve along with a constant massaging up of the proportions of pupils gaining high grades - a sleight of hand connived at by the Government which, for all its professed concern about educational standards, cannot afford to admit that they have fallen during its term of office. Under the pressure of the league tables, schools shop around quite cynically for exam boards which would give their pupils a greater chance of success - in other words, for boards with lower standards.

The contract culture has operated in other ways to institutionalise the lunacies of educational pseudo-egalitarianism. Universities receive money in proportion to the number and standard of the degrees they award. So there's intense pressure to award degrees regardless of the quality. Tutors claim their universities pressurise them to pass students who should be failed, or to award them higher grades than they merit, to keep up the fee income and university profile.

So the Tory obsession with the values of the balance sheet has joined forces with the cultural relativism of the left to destroy the building blocks of the culture. The university professors' dismay at the collapse of standards in mathematics or modern languages has been compounded by a corresponding onslaught from the ideologues of the right: with their philistine contract culture, which has institutionalised the very erosion of academic standards the Tories pretend to be halting. In fact, they are doing the exact opposite. They have bolted cultural relativism into the system.

Melanie Phillips is an Observer columnist. Her book, All Must Have Prizes, is published by Little, Brown next week, price Pounds 17.50. It can be ordered from The THES Bookshop. See coupon, page 23.