As admissions go, it's not one I ever expected to hear at an interview. It happened a few years ago, when myself and a colleague were interviewing somebody for a position in the Sunday Tribune. We'd asked him what papers he liked to read and, at the end of a long list, he came to the Sunday Independent, and particularly its colour magazine.

"It appeals to my inner pervert, " he said, about a publication which likes its female interviewees, and sometimes its journalists, to take off their clothes. He didn't get the job.

I thought about him again the other day when I read a story in the Irish Times suggesting that, since 1989, the percentage of students securing higher grades in the Leaving Cert has increased dramatically in each of the 10 most popular subjects. The number getting honours in Irish is up 24%;

the figure for maths is 22%; for English it is 20%. Geography, history, biology and French have also yielded honours to increasing numbers of students.

The story fed nicely in to a debate that has been simmering for years about whether our students are becoming less educated, less knowledgeable and less intelligent, even as their grades are getting higher.

One man who believes that this kind of dumbing down is taking place is Dr Martin O'Grady from the Institute of Technology in Tralee, who said the improving grades could only be explained by what he called "grade inflation. . . or, to put it in simpler terms, falling standards".

"Every third-level academic prepared to speak honestly, " he said, "admits that a great many students coming through from second level now show remarkable deficiencies in literacy and numeracy and have little or no sense of the art of learning. To them, learning consists of memorising material given to them in a pre-packaged form by someone else."

Unsurprisingly, O'Grady's views are not universally popular, particularly with teachers who may be partly responsible for this decline in standards.

"The improved results are not evidence of dumbing down, " said John White of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland.

"Rather, they underline how our students are doing well." He pointed to an OECD study showing Irish students coming fifth out of 29 countries in literacy tests.

When you get involved in a debate like this, you run the risk of being branded as an old fuddy duddy, one of those spit-on-the-floor merchants who believes that everything was better in his day and that the country has been transported in a handbasket to the gates of hell.

I hope I'm not being like that when I suggest that O'Grady is exactly right and that the Irish education system, over the last 10 years in particular, has been spewing out kids who have lost command of the very basics of grammar, punctuation and spelling.

This is not a hard and fast rule, of course. Just as there are young people who emerge from sixth year, and later from college, with sublime command of English, there are people in their 30s and 40s with a good education who cannot string a well-punctuated sentence together.

But, generally speaking, I have noticed in young people who have applied to work in this newspaper over the years, or who have worked here for a time, a genuinely shocking lack of ability to spell or to know where a comma should go.

They know nothing about colons other than that they sometimes get cancer. Their lack of knowledge of the country they live in is profound - they do not know where places like Ballina, Thurles or Carrick-onSuir are - and as for its history, forget about it.

These are bright young people with excellent Leaving Certs and yet they are, in terms of the knowledge they are supposed to have picked up in school, what people in my day would have called a bit thick.

There are, of course, more important things than knowing where Thurles is. Unless you live in Thurles, of course. The decline in educational standards might not matter a whit if the young people who were leaving school were more confident and better prepared for life than people of my generation were.

But I'm not sure that even this is true.

Though young people look far better than we did when I were a lad, and they have an air of entitlement about them that would have got them beaten up on the mean streets of Kilkenny in the 1970s, they seem to me, when I meet them up close, to be as lost as any teenager ever was.

This is particularly true, worryingly so, of boys. My sense of males and females just out of school or college, people in their teens or early 20s with very recent memories of their Leaving Cert, is that they are suddenly confronting the knowledge that the world is a very tough place and that they don't know as much as they thought they did.

Girls, generally speaking, deal with this at interview by preparing very well, thinking deeply about what they want to say and achieve, and sticking to their plan. Boys, generally speaking, swagger in, affecting a confidence and ability they don't have, and try to wing it.

Our pervert pal from the first paragraph was, I think, trying to impress us with the fact that he was a man of the world, a bit of a character, who'd seen it all and who could be relied upon to cover tsunamis, terrorist attacks, lap-dancing clubs and other major disasters. But all we wanted him to do was get a few news stories.

This lack of perspective, this failure to work out where one is in the food chain, is hugely damaging when combined with a belief - fuelled by an education system that marks exams too easily - that one knows it all. If secondary school is about anything, it should be the preparation of pupils, in terms of their intellect and character, to confront an increasingly difficult world.

My sense of it, for what it's worth, is that we are failing to do this. That's what dumbing down does for you.