There is a story-apocryphal, no doubt-that when Sir Keith Joseph took up his appointment as Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1981, he insisted on asking various members of his new department the question: is education for?-And they found it difficult provide a satisfactory answer... My readers may smile-but on the condition that they have an adequate answer ready. Educational theorists (and educational economists)-setting aside for the moment the advancement of learning and research-tell us that the functions of education are threefold: skills, socialisation and sorting. It is customary nowadays divide the concept of educational skills into specific disciplinary or vocational skills, on the one hand, and general (or 'transferable') skills, on the other. We know (more or less)--or think we know-what is meant by the disciplinary skills of (say) Chemistry or Computer Science or Chinese,-while acknowledging uneasily that it would be more difficult specify the disciplinary skills of English, or Economics or Engineering. And the idea of vocational skills-whether of teaching, or medicine, or librarianship, or catering, or graphic design-is not hard grasp. Transferable skills, or 'the general powers of the mind', however, are something which it is a good deal easier assert than analyse-let alone examine rigorously. Employers-who (rightly) set a high value on transferable skills-often describe them in terms of communication. problem-solving and teamwork. Most courses in British higher education offer opportunities (often indirectly, rather than directly) for the development of communication skills and problem-solving skills: but opportunities for the development of the inter-personal skills (implied in the phrase 'teamwork') are less commonly found as part of a course. It is often the social and cultural life of students (including political activity and sport) that provides them with an informal education in inter-personal skills and teamwork. What I want stress is the gulf that is set at present between academics (on the one hand) who classify-and think about-education primarily in terms of disciplinary and vocational skills and the employers (on the other) for whom transferable skills and attitude are as important-if not, more important. My colleague, David Bradshaw (Principal of the Doncaster Metropolitan Institute of Higher Education) has suggested me that we should examine more precisely what we mean when we claim-as I do-that all courses of higher education develop general powers of the mind. How are we analyse, and classify, transferable skills? Borrowing from American work, we might start by listing five essential elements: (1) the skills of communication (verbal and non-verbal); (2) quantitative competence (knowing how use, and when not use, quantitative techniques); (3) analytic skills-to which Sir Keith Joseph referred in 1984 when he argued that the study of History is valuable not least because it teaches people to use their reason as well as their memories, and develop skills of analysis and criticism in a situation where there