TRAINEE teachers at university are required to take a simple maths test in their final year, but now the authorities are considering scrapping this test because so many of the would-be teachers are failing it. Before anyone comes to a conclusion as to the rights or wrongs of this matter, it is important to see what the standard of the test is. We are not talking about the binomial theorem here or Descartes' co-ordinate geometry.

Here is a typical question from the test. A colour printer last year cost £180: this year the price has increased by five per cent; so how much does it cost now?

You can do it easily in your head. Take ten per cent of £180 - £18 - and halve it to get five per cent. That's £9. So the answer to the question is £189. I can't believe that anyone reading The Northern Echo this morning would have any trouble answering that simple question. Certainly, children of my generation would have been capable of answering it at junior school. Is it really true that trainee teachers in the third year of an honours degree in education are unable to do such simple sums? If so, things are even worse than I thought. Good grief, are graduate schoolteachers actually supposed to know something?

Actually, to ask teachers to know anything is a case of elitism involving a cruel measure of discrimination. Furthermore, it must produce stress in the trainee teachers who are being so examined. If things go on like this, teachers will be expected to know the difference between "up" and "down", "wet" and dry" next. From there onwards it is but a short step before they will be asked to spell "C-A-T" and "D-O-G". Don't be so silly, Mullen, they'll use the spell-checker! This persecution of teachers must be stopped before it spreads to other professionals. I have heard a nasty rumour that navigators on transatlantic passenger jets are expected to be able to read charts and that taxi drivers have to know their way around.

But these jokes are no laughing matter. The decline of the university is one of the plainest illustrations of the dumbed-down decadence of our age. Here are some of the comical degree courses now available in the new supermarket of mass ignorance and trivia which is the modern university: Asset Management, Beauty Therapy, Consumer Studies, Counselling, Fashion, Golf Studies, Hospitality Management, Perfumery, Turf Science, Cosmetic Science. But it's all cosmetic.

Those sorts of courses are precisely what a real university should teach us to reject. They are foreign bodies. But the modern university can't recognise foreign bodies because it has no idea what its own tissue is. The university used to exist to teach an elite how to discriminate. But "elite" and "discrimination" in our cool, contemporary, junk culture are only dirty words. How can the quality of higher education even be discussed when there are courses in Literary Theory which claim that when Christina Rossetti wrote a poem about the sea she was "really" writing about feminism and racism?

Today's problems in education are not caused by an illiterate, unteachable underclass but by the dumbing-down of what used to be the educated class. Example: Chris Smith, PhD Cantab, the Culture Secretary, was asked whether Bob Dylan's music is as good as Beethoven's. He replied: "I wouldn't want to establish hierarchies. We must not discriminate." But to foster the ability to discriminate is the aim of education. And there are hierarchies, Dr Smith, and it is the quality of the likes of Beethoven, Shakespeare and Plato which decides who is at the top of the hierarchy and who is at the bottom.

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* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange