Professor Simon Blackburn: Would I have gone to Cambridge in Clarke's brave new world? No

Had he faced £21,000 debt, then Professor Simon Blackburn's parents might have had their way

Walking around Britain's cities, browsing its press, or even watching, God help us, its television, it is hard to suppose that we suffer from a surfeit of education. Hard, as well, to think that we need to accentuate the division between the classes. That is why New Labour's target of getting 50 per cent of the young to go to university seemed a good idea.

Now we learn of a brand new way to do it: make it very expensive for them. Make sure that schoolchildren know that they will incur a frightening debt if they do go on to the sixth form and higher education. Vividly show them the difference between driving a white van tomorrow, and spending three years at a bare subsistence level, and many more crucified by the debt. That will pack them in. It is not orthodox economics. But, hey, it could work, since human beings are odd fish, and there are goods that become more alluring by being made more expensive. Vanity goods such as cosmetics and perfumes are the usual examples. Maybe the young and the poor will come to think that a casually displayed degree certificate will work the same magic on the street as a big stereo, a pair of Manolo Blahniks or a plum-coloured suit.

But in any event, if they do not, New Labour has a back-up. This is the political commissar overseeing the admission process, ensuring that universities take the right kind of people, regardless of merit. We can anticipate the care, the understanding and tact that the commissar will doubtless bring to the job, if we remember Gordon Brown's intervention in the Laura Spence case, when he first pilloried Magdalen College, Oxford, for preferring posh candidates, which they did not. He then waved Harvard at us as a model of egalitarian education, although that university has an endowment about the size of that of all Britain's universities put together. It's the Third Way in action, a nice combination of ignorance, dotty economics and Stalinism.

For my generation, university meant freedom to explore. My own experience was not unusual. I read mathematics, physics and chemistry in the sixth form. By the time I applied to Cambridge I had decided that people in arts subjects were having a better time, discussing the ins and outs of Madame Bovary while I was chained to a bench describing the properties of zinc. So I told the admissions tutor I wanted to read English. "Can't do that, sloppy subject, you won't like it," he barked. "Moral sciences is the thing for you." I said I had no idea what they were, and he said they would send me a reading list. That unlocked the world of philosophy (moral sciences turned out to be Cambridge's venerable title for philosophy) and, under the care of a legendary tutor, I never looked back. I still think he was wrong about English, but it was a happy mistake, indeed so happy that it led to 35 years in academia and a professorship at Cambridge.

Would I have done it under the proposed system? My parents strenuously opposed my choice. But they had no financial stick to wave. The state took care of that. It would have been much harder to oppose their wishes if I had anticipated a mountain of debt. The risk of reading any of the humanities might just have seemed too large. Later on, the pleasure of a career in universities might just have seemed too little, with men from the ministry scrutinising every move for political impropriety. I suspect I would have become a solicitor, an honourable calling, but different. Or I might have joined the Civil Service and become a commissar myself. There must be a kind of pleasure in control freakery.

Tony Blair has said that he regrets not coming across philosophy while he was at Oxford. I regret it as well, although it may be that by philosophy he was thinking of his wife's penchant for crystal balls or whatever it is, rather than the disciplined study of the scaffolding of thought. He is not, of course, to blame for that, any more than Ronald Reagan was to blame for Nancy's bent for astrology. But when you put it together with, for instance, his crusade for religious schooling, it is a bit disturbing. There is a sense of something not quite under the control of reason, as if the Enlightenment had never happened. I cannot help thinking that a bit of philosophy might have helped. Plato's attack on sophism, for instance, might have sensitised him to the difference between addressing people as rational agents and manipulating them, or between truth and rhetoric, substance and spin. After that, David Hume or John Stuart Mill on superstition and enthusiasm would have made a good follow-on.

When Margaret Thatcher attacked the universities in the early 1980s, one could see what she was about. Sir Keith Joseph actually thought we needed fewer, not more, people in higher education. The squires do not value learning, and it is positively dangerous if the lower orders go in for it, leaving nobody to swab out the stables. Much better to keep them quiet with soft porn in the tabloids.

It is harder to be clear about the present government's attitude. The words introducing Charles Clarke's White Paper are pious enough. But as with the Thatcher government, there is a sense that what matters is just what business is thought to need (currently, plumbers). The fact that business takes place in a democratic civil society, whose citizens therefore need to think about things such as equality, justice and liberty, is not in the foreground. The fact that the nature of our civilisation is written in its history and literature and philosophy, and needs to be encountered afresh by each generation, is not the priority. One doubts whether there is too much concern about the difference between these subjects treated in university lectures and the same treated by Disney.

How expensive is higher education? The annual budget runs at about £7bn, around the amount that the foot and mouth fiasco cost the country. Nobody can calculate the return because nobody can contemplate a modern society without lawyers, doctors, teachers, analysts, scientists, strategists, journalists and civil servants, all of whom need a modicum of critical and analytical skill to function. This is why education has so long been considered a social good, to be paid for out of general taxation. It is, indeed, also a special good for those who have it, and it is quite fair that the tax system should register that.

There is an absolutely standard way of doing it, which is to increase the higher rates of tax by whatever it takes. True, the very few who are wealthy, who got that way by other means, and who do not want to see their own children educated, would grumble about paying towards a benefit for others. But that is the way with living in a civil society. The healthy subsidise the unhealthy, and those without children subsidise those who have them.

That way, you say to children considering the sixth form: if you get rich, you will pay a little more tax. With the Government's way, you say to them: if you get educated, you will pay a lot more tax – at a higher rate while you struggle to start your life – than the richest people of all. If I cared about equality, or justice, or the quality of life, or Britain's ability to keep its place in the world, I know which I would prefer.

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and author of 'A Very Short Introduction to Ethics', to be published by Oxford University Press later this year