SCOTTISH schools and universities have expanded access and student numbers without good reason and have sacrificed the academic challenge of difficult courses for the "crass utilitarianism" of modules and employment skills.
The powerful attack is made by one of the country's foremost education experts, Professor Lindsay Paterson, of Edinburgh University.
He has written a chapter for a book of essays, published today, which seeks to develop Scottish public policy postdevolution with a vision of how Scotland could look in 2020. It includes views from across the political divide and outside it.
Agenda for a New Scotland is edited by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish National Party justice spokesman, who argues the case for "a Caledonian consensus", and has contributions from three former Labour ministers.
Mr Paterson has previously been notable for his stout defence of the liberal Scottish educational tradition, particularly comprehensive schooling and child-centred learning, which makes his critique of "trivialised" education all the more damaging.
The educational sociologist says education remains in a state of "half-fulfilled radical promise", after being defensive during the years of Conservative government. It then "stopped thinking seriously" about how to build on the comprehensive reforms of the 1960s.
"Two generations ago we created common structures of secondary schooling that have democratised access to real learning, " he writes. "But we then stopped thinking about what real learning is.
"Policy since the 1980s has rather neglected the importance of enabling students to engage properly with intellectual difficulty and intellectual worth. Instead, policy has approached the problem of motivation by diluting seriousness, by fragmenting difficult programmes of study into modularised segments, and by trying to divert students into intellectually undemanding courses of ostensibly vocational relevance.
"'Difficulty', in public debate, is synonymous with 'the basics', as if developing the capacity to read, write and count were the main criteria by which the intellectual seriousness of an education system should be judged."
With higher education undergoing the greatest change and challenge in the past 17 years since rapid expansion began, he is scathing about the lack of focus to the undergraduate curriculum: "To be frank, we don't even know whether and to what extent existing programmes of higher education are any kind of common basis for citizenship at all, " he says.
Mr Paterson says the main challenge facing the radical tradition in Scottish education is what educational expansion is for. He says that, if universities are not about the potential that comes from intellectual, serious, theoretical and difficult learning, "then they are not worth having".
His challenge to "relevant", vocational learning is followed with a call to change the focus on education as the means to develop the economy, making it instead a way of preparing people for life as decent citizens: for instance, being able to debate the meaning of a Liz Lochhead poem, an Alasdair Gray novel, a Paul Lavery film, the cases for and against wind farms or genetic modification, or understanding the historical conf lict between Christianity and Islam.
He goes on to argue that one answer should be less course choice at school and university. "Choice of programme can only be made on the basis of understanding what is rejected as well as what is selected. Students have to have a basis in a broad culture before they are in any position to make properly informed choices. Paradoxical though it may seem, compulsion is in fact the only way to underpin proper freedom."
Mr Paterson, who is editor of the magazine Scottish Affairs, was the focus of strong criticism two years ago when he suggested that parents sending their children to independent schools were wasting their money.
He resigned from the Broadcasting Council for Scotland in protest at the BBC's controversial refusal to create a Scottish Six, the proposed, unified Scottish, UK and international television news programme.
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