On this side of the Atlantic, Columbia University's School of Journalism is the oldest and most respected place of learning in the field - journalism's Vatican, some call it.

A few weeks ago, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, touched off a controversy by suspending the search for a new dean for its Graduate School of Journalism. He said the university's traditional focus on teaching journalism as a trade needed to be balanced by courses of intellectual and theoretical rigour. In a letter to the university's staff, he explained his thinking: "The Columbia School of Journalism should continue to be the leading school of its kind in the world.

"Given its history, especially its illustrious graduates, given its centrality within one of the nation's great universities, and given its location in the media capital of the world, such a level of aspiration is neither immodest or unrealistic. Columbia is the home of the Pulitzer Prizes, universally recognised as the mark of excellence in the profession, and that should be the same standard we apply to ourselves as well.

"And, yet, I cannot say that we have in mind a broad understanding of what a modern journalism school curriculum should look like. We live in an age in which the system of communications is widely understood to be undergoing revolutionary changes and, at the same time, is the critical element in forging democracies, markets, culture, and the phenomenon of globalisation. To teach the craft of journalism is a worthy goal but clearly insufficient in this new world and within the setting of a great university. Over the past century, every professional school has reached that judgment for its own field."

He deserves admiration and applause for his stand on a couple of important grounds. He identifies the more important of the two - the revolutionary changes that are now in the early stages of altering the fundamentals of the news business. They are sometimes difficult to see and understand, but to tell one part of the story, all signs are pointing in the direction of a re-definition of the importance of print journalism - that is, of the production of paper newspapers and magazines. The internet is making rapid and sweeping inroads in the way people are keeping themselves abreast of what goes on in the world.

It is easy to read about an event as it is filtered by many different sources, in order to get a more balanced and better-informed view than has been possible before. It is easy, now, to find news tailor-made to a particular interest or interests. The ease of access and linkage to sources of the internet process has already made news coverage, and perhaps especially news comment, more sophisticated than it has ever been before.

There is now a huge number of news organisations on the Internet, and the number continues to grow. At one time, internet presence seemed an experiment for newspapers that they might have backed away from in the light of experience. But a critical mass has been generated over the last ten years or so, and there is now no turning back. Any news organisation that wants a secure future must be as efficient and as good at its job in cyberspace as it is on paper. Newspapers and magazines have discovered that publishing news on the internet need not affect their circulation and, perhaps especially where archival material is concerned, can contribute to the balance sheet.

Magazines are now looking to increase their circulation by selling `download only' subscriptions. This promises to be especially effective with overseas subscriptions, currently hamstrung by heavy postal charges and slow delivery. For many in the print media, making the decision to expand wholeheartedly into the internet can be a painful process. Many have had...are still having in some cases...a difficult time working out why they should dedicate valuable resources to the internet milieu when it seems to threaten circulation, and when it is still so hard to make money at it.

But an ability to profit from an internet presence is neither the only way of looking at it, nor the most important way of looking at it. What is important is that news organisations should be poised to develop with progress, no matter in what direction progress leads, and not gasping and spluttering in its wake. This is what Mr.. Bollinger had in mind when he called a halt at the Graduate School of Journalism, and set up a team to look at what the demands on his future graduates might be. But I think he probably also deserves applause on the ground that education itself has changed shape radically in the last few years.

Youngsters emerging from high school no longer have the breadth and depth of education they once did - increasingly, a first degree in university is seen as filling in the gaps left by changes in high school learning.

Lord Rees-Mogg, once editor of the Times of London, published an article in that newspaper late last year, lamenting just this: "Only 40 years ago," he wrote, in the article, which was entitled `On the front line in war against dunces', "the grammar and public schools, which are themselves only fee-paying and independent grammar schools, turned out students with a wider and deeper general education than one now finds in the average university graduate.

In the 1950s a good student would leave a grammar school with some knowledge of four languages and four great literatures; the fourth language was English, which was learnt by contrasting its usages with Latin, Greek and French. The student would have been grounded in mathematics and science, and would also have studied English history and the Bible, which contains the holy books of two world religions. Too few students had the advantage of this excellent education.

"In 1964 a Labour Government was elected with a policy of correcting this inequality, not by creating more grammar schools, but by destroying those that already existed. They did not attack the private schools; they destroyed the best part of state education. This was an act of iconoclasm, far more destructive in its long-term consequences than the destruction of the two great Buddhist statues by the Taleban."

Nowhere is the watering-down of education more keenly felt than in journalism. Changes in newspaper staffing, brought about by computerisation, have already reduced the filters through which raw copy passes on its way to print to almost nothing. If a reporter cannot spell, or cannot construct a sentence properly, there is a chance that his or her mistakes will not be caught, and will end up in print. Naturally, readers tend to believe that if the reporter makes childish mistakes in English, and his newspaper allows them to be published, neither one can be trusted to deal with the news of the day in a mature way.

Journalism is a profession to which people who want to change the world are attracted, because they believe that through it, they can be advocates for a better way. But in its best and most effective state, it is a profession in which proselytizers of any stripe are largely unwelcome, especially on the lower rungs of the ladder, because the essence of journalism is not the presentation of truth - the man has not been born who is capable of that - but the business of accurately presenting both sides of a story, without prejudice, and allowing the reader to draw such conclusions as he, or she, will.

But on many people, especially people whose learning is limited, that point is lost. They cannot shake the idea that journalism should be a profession for modern-day Crusaders, journeying out into the lands of the unwashed, to convert them to their particular version of Truth and Justice. Journalism is a profession full of moral dilemmas, many of which must be faced and decided on the spot by those doing the reporting... those whose education, recently, has prepared them for those dilemmas badly, if at all.

The group Mr. Bollinger is setting up to look at Columbia's curriculum - they will report back to him at the end of the fall term - will quickly find themselves trying to define the meaning of education, once again. You would have thought that might have been something that was sorted out way back around the time we were trying to invent matches. Not a bit of it, though.

Educators still can't agree on what they're supposed to be doing. Is it the process of passing on knowledge? Is it the process of developing a child's character? Is it the process of teaching children how to learn? Passing on knowledge is what most teachers do, and that approach is the basis of teaching such skills as journalism as a craft, the very thing Mr. Bollinger is decrying.

My money's on the last - teaching children how to learn. The best way of doing that really hasn't changed since the Renaissance, when John Colet and Thomas More and Erasmus were around. You expose students to the best that has ever been said, thought, constructed and written, and you infect them with a desire to be a part of the celebration and improvement of those facets of human culture, each in his or her own place in the world.

So go to it, Mr. Bollinger.

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