Dumbing down has become one of those phrases that is so widespread that we accept it as a fact of life. And we're right to, as this is a phenomenon that evidently exists. There are millions of people not reading books or even paid-for newspapers, watching junk television, failing not very difficult exams (or collecting what look like cheap A grades), and using the might of Google to find out the latest news on Britney Spears.

Terse, alliterative and memorable, dumbing down is a good label - in fact too good, as it has ended up dazzling us. It has fooled us into seeing intellectual standards as a one-way street, heading downhill.

But this is a one-eyed, Grumpy Old Men view of what is really going on. A more accurate picture would show a two-way street with heavy traffic on both sides. There is plenty of evidence of the opposite of dumbing down: wising up.

Our appetite for culture is growing. Last week Malcolm Gladwell, a successful journalist and author but hardly a household name, gave a pair of talks at a West End theatre to promote his new book. He charged up to £25 for tickets and sold out. A writer was being treated like a rock star.

At the Arts Council, they keep count of the number of literary festivals in Britain: in October 2008 alone, there were 43 of them. Hay-on-Wye expects to sell 165,000 tickets next year. At the first Hay festival, 20 years ago, that figure was 2,000. In terms of numbers, Hay has gone from Glyndebourne to Glastonbury - complete with mud, this year.

The great museums are packing them in like sports grounds. When The Art Newspaper drew up a chart for museum admissions (in February, covering the calendar year 2007), Paris bagged the top two spots with the Louvre at 8.3 million and the Pompidou Centre on 5.5 million, but three of the next six places went to this country: Tate Modern with 5.2 million, the British Museum with 4.8 million, and the National Gallery with 4.1 million. The Arts Council says that admissions to Britain's leading museums as a whole went up from 24 million in 1999-2000 to 40 million in 2007-08. This is partly accounted for by the wise decision to scrap entry charges and replace them with the modern version of the begging bowl, the big Perspex ball. But it can't be the sole explanation, because some of the biggest draws in those museums have been the special exhibitions, which tend not to be free.

At the British Museum, the Terracotta Army was a roaring success and the Hadrian show was so crowded when I went in October that sweat was pouring down visitors' faces. That annual figure of 4.8 million has already shot up to six million, which is thought to be a record. When they laid on some sideshows for Chinese new year - a food market, a theatre troupe, a trail of specially commissioned lanterns - they were so inundated that they had to shut the doors for the first time since the Chartists' uprising in 1848.

These days, we even go to lectures. Until recently “lecture” was almost a dirty word, suggesting something either dreary or condescending. Then along came Intelligence Squared, which puts on lectures and debates featuring writers, politicians and others at venues such as the Royal Geographical Society in London. It is now expanding into America and Australia and has done a deal with BBC World to have a series of debates broadcast. Like Gladwell, it charges £25. Like Chelsea or Manchester United, it offers season tickets (£100 for five lectures) and premium season tickets (£250 for five lectures, with a front-row seat).

The web has played a big part here. It allows a small company such as Intelligence Squared to build a community and sell tickets direct. Even a big institution like the National Theatre has seemed a livelier, more welcoming place since it started sending out a crisply edited e-mail newsletter.

For the web user, going online can involve anything from scholarship to pornography, but broadly speaking when we log on we are at least more active and alert than when we watch television: not slumping, but searching. And just when it looked as if written communication had shrivelled to the narrow confines of the business letter, e-mail has come along and turned millions of people back into writers. We may just be gossiping, but we are writing, which forces us to crystallise our thoughts.

Now that television isn't the only entertainment hub in the home, we seem to be watching it more discerningly. Hard-drive recording makes it easy to stockpile the good stuff and less tempting to settle for the bad. DVD, with its seductive box sets, raises our brow, pointing us away from pap and towards The Wire or The Simpsons - a show loved by children that is far smarter than anything their parents were watching at the same age, back in the so-called golden age of telly.

Behind all these cultural trends lies a clear demographic factor: more of us are going to university than ever before. We may fritter away much of our time while we're there, standing in the students' union bar drinking subsidised beer, but at the very least those years plant a seed of curiosity and a sense of possibility. Twenty-five years on, several of my contemporaries are now going back to university for more. Kingsley Amis famously said that in higher education more would mean worse. In fact, more has meant less of the sort of snobbery that he was displaying by saying that.

Studies have shown that today's graduates are cultural omnivores, able to enjoy high and pop culture alike. Which is where dumbing down gets it wrong. Catchy as it is, the phrase has a certain dumbness built into it. The real story is more complex and more heartening.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life magazine. The winter issue, with a cover story on mass intelligence, is on sale now.

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