Tonight I’ll be tak­ing the stage at the Agora debate in the Guard­ian news­room. Here’s my con­tri­bu­tion (as Adrian Monk) to Edu­ca­tion Guard­ian in sup­port of the motion: Renais­sance Man is dead. Edu­ca­tion should be about train­ing in sub­jects that will boost the eco­nomy.

What do we know about the world since the Renais­sance? Almost every single for­ward move­ment in advan­cing the pos­i­tion of human­kind has come from sci­ence, tech­no­logy and business.

James Watt developed the steam engine that powered the Indus­trial Revolu­tion in a work­shop at Glas­gow Uni­ver­sity. His part­ner­ship with Mat­thew Boulton made it a com­mer­cial success.

Where will the advances that take us for­ward in this cen­tury come from? Will they emerge from study of the nine­teenth cen­tury novel, or being able to trans­late the Hesiod, or from theo­logy (I’m open to tak­ing bets)?

You know the answer, and yet we con­tinue to sub­sid­ise 30% of our under­gradu­ates to study these sub­jects in uni­ver­sit­ies. Are we nuts?

We’re pro­du­cing gradu­ates who far from being Renais­sance schol­ars wouldn’t be able to fig­ure out a prob­lem posed by a Renais­sance math­em­atician. A uni­ver­sity sys­tem that allows people to indulge in aca­demic enter­tain­ment and then awards them a degree doesn’t deserve pub­lic money. A free Sudoku book­let for school leav­ers would be a bet­ter use of our taxes.

So what should we do about it? The employ­ment mar­ket has already dis­coun­ted degrees that aren’t rel­ev­ant to busi­ness. Male arts gradu­ates can expect to be worse off over their life­time after pay­ing for the kind of know­ledge the eco­nomy doesn’t care about.

Do we really need another gov­ern­ment con­sulta­tion or ini­ti­at­ive for this to sink in? Or do we need pro­spect­ive stu­dents to wake up and smell the cof­fee on job pro­spects before they end up brew­ing it for a living?

I’m not sug­gest­ing that uni­ver­sit­ies open fac­ulties of barista stud­ies or call centre etiquette. Far from it. Edu­ca­tion in sub­jects that will boost the eco­nomy doesn’t need to mean stu­dents order­ing from a menu provided by local employ­ers, allow­ing them to out­source their train­ing budgets to uni­ver­sity departments.

Instead it means giv­ing gradu­ates the abil­ity to excel in the kind of sub­jects that we know will feed an information-based, technology-driven global eco­nomy. We may not know with con­fid­ence exactly what those are, but we can be damn sure what they are not – lib­eral arts and human­it­ies subjects.

If you don’t believe me, a his­tory grad, then take the word of Nets­cape founder Marc Andreessen:

“Gradu­at­ing with a tech­nical degree is like head­ing out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don’t miss that oppor­tun­ity because of some fuzzy roman­ti­cized view of lib­eral arts broad­en­ing your horizons.”

Andreessen is abso­lutely right. Even in a sub­ject like mine — journ­al­ism — the future is being shaped by gradu­ates like Adrian Holovaty, who have developed pro­gram­ming lan­guages and web­sites that aggreg­ate inform­a­tion in ways tra­di­tional news pro­viders could never dream of.

And yet all too often uni­ver­sit­ies are happy to play the game, pil­ing on vocational-sounding courses whilst pan­der­ing to pop­u­lar fads. In my area, journ­al­ism, there are more than 150 courses avail­able for an industry that has pre­cious few job openings.

If you think it’s just journ­al­ism, take a look at the CSI effect. Last year UCAS had nearly 250 Forensic Sci­ence courses on its books, with nearly 1,700 stu­dents enrolled. Will those gradu­ates find work in a pro­fes­sion with just over 2,500 registered practitioners?

There are over 300 tele­vi­sion stud­ies courses. Com­bine that with forensic sci­ence and you just might qual­ify for a shovel on Time Team.

I’m not sug­gest­ing we shut down Eng­lish depart­ments and Forensic Sci­ence degrees en masse. Let them flour­ish if they provide an oppor­tun­ity to study as a leis­ure activity.

The growth of gene­a­logy demon­strates the pub­lic appet­ite for recre­ational learn­ing in areas that uni­ver­sit­ies barely sup­port. By all means let people study his­tory, the clas­sics, nov­els, the media. But let them do it in their spare time – not as a state sponsored, loan-financed languor.

When math­em­at­ics, which under­pins almost every achieve­ment in our civil­iz­a­tion, comes twen­ti­eth in the most pop­u­lar sub­jects at uni­ver­sity, you can see how Renais­sance schol­ars might look at us with some­thing like disgust.

If we really want to main­tain and improve our pos­i­tion in the world we need to edu­cate more tech­nic­ally skilled gradu­ates, and send out into the world eco­nomy more people able to see soph­ist­ic­ated oppor­tun­it­ies and take advant­age of them, both intel­lec­tu­ally and commercially.