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Future generations will look back on this decade as a period of far-reaching and hotly debated changes at all levels of the British education system. What their verdict will be, however, is far from certain. According to those in the current Labour government, they will regard these changes as having ushered in a golden age of educational opportunity for all. According to others, our grandchildren will curse us for having deprived them of all contact with the best that has been thought and said in the world. Or they will simply wallow in ignorance, unaware of their cultural poverty.

Frank Furedi is definitely in the latter camp. In his provocative new book, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Furedi argues that the expansion of higher education in the UK has occurred side by side with a widespread erosion of educational standards and a steady rise in cultural illiteracy. The explanation for this paradoxical state of affairs lies, according to Furedi, in the rise of an instrumentalist ethos that treats knowledge and culture as means for achieving economic and political objectives rather than as ends in themselves. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is now regarded by the political elite as a bit dodgy (to quote Charles Clarke, the secretary of state for education); instead, education must now justify itself in terms of the economic benefits it provides to stakeholders.
Furedi bemoans the bureaucratic procedures that the government has imposed on universities and colleges which measure performance according to criteria that satisfy the demands of external auditors for numerical data, but which have little to do with genuine learning. And he skilfully identifies the central problem with this audit culture - namely, that it does not merely measure, but also radically transforms how educational institutions operate in ways that are mostly negative.

Furedi is not the only one to decry the dumbing down of contemporary culture, and nor is the philistinism he condemns limited to the UK. Over the past few years, a growing number of critics both at home and abroad have made similar observations. Such criticisms are usually dismissed by politicians as elitist, but Furedi makes a powerful case that it is the politicians themselves who are guilty of elitism. Their willingness to lower standards in the name of "widening access" and "public participation" betrays an implicit pessimism about the intellectual potential of the general public. By contrast, Furedi is unashamedly optimistic about the capacity of ordinary people to benefit from demanding forms of cultural and educational experience. He castigates woolly educationalists for treating students as fragile creatures whose self-esteem will be irreparably damaged if they are ever allowed to fail, arguing that such low expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead, he proposes an inspiring vision of hungry minds that need solid food, not bite-sized nuggets that offer no real nourishment.

Fruedi's confidence in the desire of ordinary people to engage with demanding forms of cultural experience, and in their capacity to benefit from such engagement, is touching but rather starry-eyed. People with a genuine thirst for culture are always in the minority - they are never ordinary people, but always extraordinary. When it comes to the acquistion of culture, there is no such thing as democracy. The philistines will always be with us.

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, as it deals not so much with intellectuals - with people - as with the general climate of anti-intellectualism that currently predominates in our educational and cultural institutions. So Furedi's thesis cannot be rebutted simply by claiming that there are plenty of intellectuals around today, nor by pointing to the list of "the top 100 British public intellectuals" that the magazine Prospect recently published.

Furedi would probably argue that many of those in Prospect's list do not deserve to be included, since he believes that being an intellectual implies social engagement. Scientific or artistic achievement by itself is not enough. For Furedi, an intellectual is not a mere specialist, but someone whose interests are wide-ranging and who grapples with the important social issues of their time. This last qualification struck me as rather restrictive. Some of the greatest intellectuals have taken very little interest in politics. Great scientists and great artists are often precisely those who rise above such vulgar matters and seek something greater - truth in the one case, beauty in the other.

Despite my quibbles, I warmly recommend Furedi's new book to the politicians, civil servants, vice-chancellors and headteachers who control educational policy in Britain today. But if the cultural mandarins ignore this book, as they probably will, then I hope that it may at least inspire rank-and-file professionals - lecturers, teachers, researchers - to resist the philistine agenda that they are urged to implement, and to offer their students a grander and bolder vision of the life of the mind.