Keira Knightley, aged 23, has told a magazine that she is “completely uneducated” and that not going to university gave her a chip on her shoulder. “It makes me feel I am going to read absolutely everything so I can prove that I am not stupid.” The poor girl is currently wading through a biography of Albert Speer, a history of the Vietnam War, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Germaine Greer's hoary old Female Eunuch. With dyslexia, too. What a heroine. Meanwhile, innumerable men and women who do have university degrees - and therefore no chips but a sense of quiet 2:1 superiority - will be on the beach happily sinking themselves in moronic chick-lit and Jeremy Clarkson.

You might conclude that it is actually better for your educational morale and motivation to skip university and its three years of squalid quarters, unwise drinking, rising debt, dodgy romances and desultory study. If you don't need a technical specialism and have no real passion for the humanities, hurling yourself into the world might do as well. An actor's life itself is not a bad liberal education: Knightley has been led through the Russian Revolution in Dr Zhivago, considered multiculturalism and sport in Bend it Like Beckham, and entered the worlds of Jane Austen, Dylan Thomas and Second World War nurses. She shortly takes on late Shakespeare as Cordelia. Had she gone into another field - say derivatives trading or being a holiday rep - she could also have learnt things - geographical, economic, scientific - while still gamely plugging away at Speer and Greer in the evenings. It's all a matter of attitude. It could be that the definition of education that Knightley eventually reaches is a higher thing than many graduates can claim.

Coincidentally, this summer sees the launch of a slightly ludicrous (though probably lucrative) “School of Life” in London, offering courses in “the big issues of life” with “great thinkers” like Alain de Botton. It targets “bright, busy people who want to make the most of their careers and lifestyles and limited time off”, and claims to be “a travel agent for the mind”. I have to say it all sounds deliciously bite-size - no nasty essays or heavy reading, just outings with great thinkers to “explore the history of romance in a Travelodge” or discuss holidaymaking traditions on the Isle of Wight.

You can also buy for 50 quid one hour's intimate chat with a professional - they cite architect, actor, accountant, anaesthetist, airline pilot, palaeontologist, landscape designer. I suppose it saves joining the Rotary. The whole thing sounds like a finishing school for people rendered unconfident because they have been too busy in the office to look around them. It even offers lessons in dinner-party conversation; though if, as reported, they really think that “Freddie Flintoff's battle cry for England cricket” is a good topic for mixed company, get me out of here quick.

It all feeds the chip on the British shoulder which creaks like Keira's: “Am I uneducated? Do people despise me? Am I missing a whole dimension of life?” But it is no bad thing to have that chip. Anyone, at any age or eminence, who considers their education to be finished is an idiot. And, alas, that is especially true if it was a modern British state education. Schools now are more or less forced to teach strictly to the test, on a curriculum that is often direly timid. You can pass your Shakespeare paper on a couple of scenes without experiencing the whole story, strike lucky in a multiple-choice science paper and reduce history to downloading “model answers” and spitting back lists of undigested themes and wisdoms about the Second World War.

“General studies” papers are more likely to ask you for half-baked journalistic sociology about globalisation or environmentalism than to want solid fact or the making of original connections. Universities express dismay that students arrive without ever having had to write an original essay, and never having voluntarily read more widely around the subject they claim to love. The International Baccalaureate serves children better than A levels, but is rare. By and large, unless you strike an unusually passionate sixth form full of extra-curricular debates and trips, your school education will be a pawky, uninspiring affair. University might set you haring off down exciting new tracks. Or it might not, if you get virtually no small-group discussion and never meet real academics at all, only weary PhD students slaving to earn their rent.

And then there is a creeping utilitarianism. It is hard, looking at the attitude government now takes to education, to connect it with the line from the American philosopher Rosenstock-Hussey: “The goal of education is to form the Citizen; and the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilisation.” That is so breathtakingly, optimistically American that it brings tears to the eyes. Or, from Britain, take the 1928 speech (I found it in the Times Archive) at Morley College for Working Men and Women. Addressing manual workers, Lord Eustace Percy said: “There is always a tendency to devote education to apparently directly utilitarian purposes... but the whole idea and purpose of a liberal education is to liberate the mind.”

Mercifully, outside of the centrally cramped, tickbox-tested formal education system and bite-size doses of Culture Lite, 21st-century Britain shows a real urge towards autodidacticism. Radio 4 and bookshops flourish. Adult education pressure groups fight like tigers to stop government axeing or pricing-out the “useless” subjects.

And almost most encouraging of all, as the Edinburgh Fringe opens, reflect that a remarkable amount of our best comedy assumes and demands a wide frame of cultural reference. In among the pubby dross and repetitive bigotry (yep, Little Britain) there shines the tradition of Python - you've got to be aware of the Spanish Inquisition and Jean-Paul Sartre - and of Les Dawson, who used everything from Beethoven to Charles Lamb's Essays to reckless effect, while not neglecting such staples as mothers-in-law.

We still turn out sharply intelligent and well-read comedy artists, fit to re-found civilisation: Stewart Lee, Christopher Green, Jack Dee all pull big audiences. It seems that neither the horrid froth of celebrity mags and trash telly, nor the dull sterility of government exams, can tell the whole story of the modern British mind. Thank God.

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