It’s a modern room. The university is barely older than I am, but my interviewer is much older than us both. Only later do I discover quite how eminent he is in the world of medieval English scholarship. Only in retrospect do I realise how much of my subsequent life hung in the balance as I settled myself and tried to exude a confidence I did not really feel.

“Tell me”, he says, “why should the government pay for you to come to university to study things that are not true?”

I am up for this one. My school debating skills are honed to rapier-point sharpness. I attack the idea that any government should decide what is worthy of study at university with a ferocious disdain and a newfound swashbuckling confidence.

My interviewer smiles and, merely by doing so, staunches my flow of words. He is kindly enough but there’s something wrong.

“Yes, of course,” he says, “but could you now explore the more serious proposition in my question?”

A pause as I mentally recalibrate and inwardly panic.

He smiles again and helps me out.

“In what sense is what we call literature true or not true? And how do we know?”

Now my ferocious disdain has turned into incoherence and my swashbuckling confidence has vanished. I have learned an important lesson about the difference between a school debate and a university tutorial. But they offered me a place to study English anyway, and the rest … well, the rest is a good story.

Several decades later, many academics currently face redundancy from their posts in university English departments. In June this year, The Guardian reported that, according to data from universities admissions service Ucas, 7,045 18-year-olds in the UK had applied to study English at university - a fall of more than a third from 10,740 in 2012. Over the same period there has been a boom in applications for subjects such as computer science, psychology and maths.

Novelists including Mark Haddon, writer of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, accused the government of “baseless prejudice” against the humanities as they made an impassioned plea for universities not to ditch their English degrees despite this reduction in applications. The Guardian reported that “experts” had identified the root of the problem as the slump in numbers studying English at exam level. Unfortunately, the issue is a lot more fundamental than that.

To find out how fundamental, we need only take the word of the secretary of state for education in England. Speaking at the launch of the Office for Students’ review of digital teaching in higher education in February, Gavin Williamson said: “Instead of pushing young people on to dead-end courses that give them nothing but a mountain of debt, we need universities and colleges to work together to address the gaps in our labour market, and create the valuable and technical courses our society needs.”

So, a modern version of that interview question I faced would be: “Why should you allow yourself to be pushed on to a dead-end course that will give you nothing but a mountain of debt?”

To which the correct answer would clearly not be: “Because in 40 years’ time, I want to be able to challenge the policy statements of the secretary of state for education and critique his dubious English usage.”

But here goes anyway.

The BBC supposedly commissioned Kenneth Clark’s 1969 television series Civilisation to promote the sale of colour television sets. It failed in the case of my parents, who were happy to watch in black and white, relying on the accompanying book for sumptuous colour plates. I was too young to watch the programmes but I remember skimming the book and I especially remember the images on the front and back cover. Now I know that the front was a detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens in the Vatican, which depicts Euclid giving a geometry lesson. The back showed a stunning panoramic view of the Forth Rail Bridge by architectural photographer Eric de Maré.

This juxtaposition of images was intended as something of an answer to a stale debate about the so-called “two cultures” that had been spluttering on throughout the 20th century, and too often this debate is echoed in the words of 21st-century politicians.

There are not two cultures, the book cover says, but one civilisation. There is no juxtaposition between “dead-end courses” and “the valuable and technical courses our society needs”. Civilisation is driven by knowledge and learning and ambition and the ability to comprehend more than a simplistic slogan or a false opposition. There is beauty in design and utility in art, after all.

During lockdown, I noticed that you could stream the whole series of Civilisation, and so I watched it for the first time and in colour. Kenneth Clark was called “patrician”, and he is. His language is dated, his choice of examples Eurocentric and his narrative populated almost exclusively by dead white males. But Clark’s vision is nevertheless democratic. He does not talk down, still less dumb down. He is personally engaging and leads with the polite expectation that the viewer will follow. But there is no complex code to crack to do so. He may be a figure from a past age, but he was at ease with the technology of the present and knew how to deploy it to great effect. And it is no coincidence that his producer was David Attenborough, a man who has himself done more to educate the world than practically any other human being, in his own lucid and deeply engaging style.

But to return to Gavin Williamson’s rather less lucid and engaging style: it is not entirely clear, but he appears to be saying that the opposite to a dead-end course is one that is technical and valuable. Not all technical courses are valuable, then, but all those that are both technical and valuable are the ones that are needed by our society. An insidious implication of these words is not only that courses that are not technical can never be what our society needs, or be valuable, but also that they are little short of a confidence trick designed only to leave young people with mountains of debt.

Here is the true opposition of a Kenneth Clark conception of civilisation: not a welcoming, democratic opening to learning, but a suspicious, snarky, cynical warning against being duped. It closes down options for young people by pointing out that the cost of those opportunities is far above their value in the brutal reality of the labour market, and it is far beyond the young people’s ability to afford that cost.

“Mountains of debt” are the consequence of making economically naive decisions rather than the result of government policy not to pay for its young to go to university to study anything, let alone “things that are not true”.

I do understand the point of well-intentioned people who suggest that we have raised a university degree to a status that distorts the decision making of young people. They are right that there are many ways to success, and an academic route via a full-time university course is not the best for everyone. There is no reason why someone who wants to be a plumber should feel diminished for not wanting to study for an English degree.

But there is danger even in the words of the well-intentioned. Why shouldn’t the person who wants to be a plumber also study English if she wants to? When well-intentioned people say, “You don’t have to go to university to succeed,” the danger is that marginalised and underrepresented groups will hear the age-old message, “University is not for the likes of you.” At which point an egalitarian and inclusive message becomes as elitist and exclusive as you get.

In fact, it risks compounding much less well-intentioned messages to create the idea that courses like English are fine for those who have money to burn, who will never have to work for their living or who will never have to struggle in life, rather than those courses being central to a common civilisation and accessible to all (if they are needed in any society, it is not “our” society, but someone else’s - an elite society).

Fortunately, as the first person in my family to even apply to university, I never heard that message. I never doubted that the long line of stokers, domestic servants, labourers and pitmen who represented my heritage also shared a civilisation that could encompass the rivets on the Forth Rail Bridge as readily as the brushstrokes of Raphael. I knew for certain that several of them had yearned to go to university, that they would have been there like a shot had there been any chance of them doing so, and that their lives would in all senses have been richer - and no doubt happier and longer - as a result.

Former Labour schools minister Lord Adonis has pointed out that, before the Second World War, barely half of adults had been to secondary school and that controversy reigned about increasing this proportion. But after the war, it just happened. Adonis continues to champion the target set by the Blair government and achieved for the first time this year across the UK - that half of school leavers should go on to university. In a recent article in Prospect, he argued that the target should, in fact, have been higher and points out the colossal economic advantages that new universities have brought to otherwise disadvantaged parts of the country. Building universities is a way of levelling up without dumbing down or shutting out.

That was certainly the view of the authors of the 1963 Robbins Report, which presaged the earlier increase in university places from which I ultimately benefited. They articulated a necessary balance between the labour market and a university education:

“We deceive ourselves if we claim that more than a small fraction of students in institutions of higher education would be where they are if there were no significance for their future careers in what they hear and read … [But] we must postulate that what is taught should be taught in such a way as to promote the general powers of the mind. The aim should be to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women.”

It is interesting to note Kenneth Clark reflecting that language in his series. He said: “Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity - enough to provide a little leisure. But far more, it requires confidence - confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers.”

The confidence we need is not the swashbuckling confidence of a school debater, but a confidence rooted in deep understanding of who we are, where we have been and what our future challenges may be.

As the British Academy put it in a report in 2020: “We need to plan an education and skills system which will build the society we want to live in, with individuals able to tackle the challenges we face and shape the future. The arts, humanities and social sciences will be vital in doing this …”

We run the risk that we will end up with neither civilisation nor material prosperity unless we give young people equal confidence in their mental powers and their technical abilities. Those who denigrate either undermine both.

Melvyn Roffe is principal of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh

This article originally appeared in the 30 July 2021 issue under the headline “Learning only for work is the end of civilisation”