IT has become an article of faith, shared across the spectrum of political opinion, that the success of an education system should be judged by its economic return or contribution to industry or employment. Investment, in this view, should be geared towards a financial return, perhaps in the long term, but in any case some measurable return should be expected.

No one would express themself in quite such crude terms, but this belief lies behind both the criteria laid down for the funding of much university research and behind reforms in the school system. It also provides the rationale for the Scottish Executive linking the Scottish universities and industry in the one department, rather than keeping responsibility for all education inside the same ministry.

It is not reasonable to object to the proposition that the industrial, economic and financial needs of Scottish society have to be borne in mind in any education system, but it is reasonable to suggest that the currently dominant outlook is skewed and unbalanced, in that it gives an inadequate role to the humanities and to the arts as well as to the sciences and to engineering. The improvement in an individual which is brought about by education should not be limited to such a mechanistic approach.

It has been easy to point to rising exam grades as a sign of ever improving standards, but this can hardly be adequate as a basis for a deeper judgment of the level of knowledge which candidates have attained. The growing number of degrees at first class or upper second class level is no more satisfactory as a criterion. These are tests or surveys carried on inside the system by people who, perhaps unconsciously, adjust their standards to match current expectations.

Our practices and underlying - often unexamined - philosophy are imbued with an unnecessary and self-fulfilling pessimism over the capacity of our students. We ask little of them, and are producing an under-educated generation, less equipped with knowledge than their continental counterparts.

No reasonable individual can question the value of the drive to eliminate privilege and elitism, but it appears that when elitism and knowledge showed themselves to be in conflict it was the knowledge that was jettisoned and not the elitism. We have ended up with a profound, unintended shift which has produced an alienated population, bereft of critical sense, dependent on an entertainment culture. We have not produced the improvement in individuals which should be the main function of an education system.

When the study of history showed itself to be demanding, it was replaced by projects, so we have ended up with minds marooned in the present with no sense of the past. When grammar required effort, it was replaced by free expression. When it turned out that the learning of other languages was not all beer and skittles, languages were downgraded from a compulsory place in the syllabus to a more anodyne position as an entitlement.

The suggestion is often advanced that there has been, among young people, an advance in self-confidence, in articulacy or in the acquisition of other skills, and that these gains should more than compensate for any loss entailed by these changes. This supposed gain is not evident, and is scarcely amenable to empirical examination.

It would be valuable to set the debate on education in Scotland in a European context. It is not merely that Europe will provide many of the competitors in a future knowledge economy but also that it still provides worthwhile standards.

The universities have, with the various Erasmus and Socrates schemes organised from Brussels, become European institutions which will routinely have students from several countries in the one class. It is a disconcerting experience for Scottish lecturers to note the gulf, not in innate ability, but in skills, knowledge and cultural awareness between products of Scottish schools and products of other systems. In this context, I fear that our young people underachieve.

hile it is the case that the school system should never again be obliged to cater only for the needs of the minority who will proceed to university, it is true that universities have been obliged to tailor their teaching to the impoverished knowledge which students, even those who have seemingly high grades in Higher examinations, now have.

We have done a disservice to our students at every level, and to citizens, by depriving them of the opportunity of gaining an understanding of how their own language works. It is an act of self-deception to believe that clear expression can be achieved by students who are bereft of a good knowledge of syntax, or for whom grammar is a closed book. The conviction that a knowledge of the structure of one’s own language, or grammar, is indispensable is common in European countries.

The inescapable conclusion is that in a globalised economy, and in a Europe which is becoming ever more closely integrated, Scotland is not making progress in learning to communicate in other languages.

Current policies on modern language teaching are neither clear nor helpful. The move from compulsion to entitlement was twinned, if the response to the report Citizens of a Multilingual World is to be believed, with a wish to see an increase in the provision for language teaching and in the number of pupils who take languages. But recent surveys from England indicate that following the phasing out of compulsion, almost a third of schools are planning to drop languages for pupils over 14. This is not a helpful precedent.

Joseph Farrell is professor of Italian studies at Strathclyde University.