By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

 Are you the product of a sound, basic education?

In the eyes of the president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, "a good education teaches you how to ask a question."

"It's knowing what you don't know," Dr. Botstein said, "the skills of critical thought."

The president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, has a somewhat different take. "Ideally, one should know who Shakespeare was and why Shakespeare was important to us," Mr. LeClerc said. "At the same time, one should know who Toni Morrison is and why her voice and take on America is important to us."

And what might enable you to pass muster with Michael Goldstein, the founder of a charter school in Boston?

"Write and e-mail a persuasive, three-paragraph letter to the editor about voting improprieties in your local district; research online and analyze the statistical differences between Pat Buchanan's vote totals during the '96 and '00 elections; read and comprehend the `No Cell Phone' sign at restaurants."

Of course, there is no one meter to measure whether you have received a sound, basic education, as required by the constitutions of New York and many other states. But there is a general view that besides practical skills like making change or reading a map, such an education should include critical reasoning and the ability to form judgments and opinions independently and, as Robert Silvers, an editor of The New York Review of Books, said, "to acquire some intellectual curiosity about learning more and exploring the possibilities of science and the understanding you get from literature and the arts."

For all the differing views of what a sound, basic education comprises, there is also seemingly overwhelming agreement that many people are not getting one.

In a ruling last week, Justice Leland DeGrasse of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan decided that New York State's formula for public school financing was unconstitutional and deprived students in New York City of their constitutional right to a sound, basic education.

Picking up on an earlier court's ruling that such an education leaves a citizen competent to vote and to serve on a jury, Justice DeGrasse elaborated:

"A capable and productive citizen doesn't simply show up for jury service. Rather she is capable of serving impartially on trials that may require learning unfamiliar facts and concepts and new ways to communicate and reach decisions with her fellow jurors. To be sure, the jury is in some respects an anti-elitist institution where life experience and practical intelligence can be more important than formal education. Nonetheless, jurors may be called on to decide complex matters that require the verbal, reasoning, math, science and socialization skills that should be imparted in public schools. Jurors today must determine questions of fact concerning DNA evidence, statistical analyses and convoluted financial fraud, to name only three topics."

A former New York State education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, now a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, testified for the plaintiffs, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and explained why the earlier court ruling had used the jury service example.

"A hundred years ago, the question for the jury was did he steal the horse or didn't he," Dr. Sobol said in an interview. "Nowadays people need to be able to understand DNA evidence ?la the O. J. Simpson trial."

New York City's public schools do not necessarily equip students to be able to achieve that understanding, critics have long complained. And Justice DeGrasse found that their complaints have merit.

A survey of 450 employers conducted two years ago for the New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce found that only 10 percent of respondents thought a high school diploma meant that students had mastered basic skills.

That, said Augusta Kappner, the president of the Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan, bodes ill for the future as employment and even everyday life demand the ability to sort through information and make sound judgments.

"That takes a lot more knowledge and skill than it used to," Dr. Kappner said. "There are many more sources of information, and one has to be able to sort it and weigh it."

As information and its sources grow more complex, the ability to evaluate information becomes ever more important, said Dr. Botstein, of Bard. "Computers can create the appearance of a good statistical argument when it is not an argument at all," he said. "The capacity to analyze argument is ever more important. Knowing how to distinguish good information from bad information."

And those whose job is to teach such skills say the challenge is more than daunting. "This is a generation that watches a sitcom and gets a problem solved in 20 minutes," said Phyllis C. Williams, the principal of Eleanor Roosevelt Intermediate School in Washington Heights, Manhattan. She said she hoped that the future good citizens at her school would graduate with respect for others and for themselves.

She said that one way in which she steers her students toward that goal is by arranging for them to volunteer at nursing homes and day care centers and by attracting business professionals and artists to visit the school. "The child has to feel they can achieve," she said.

Likewise Mr. Goldstein, who is the executive director of the Media and Technology Charter High School in Boston, also known as Match, suggested that graduating with a diploma should not be the final measure of a student's success at that age..

"The statistic is that two-thirds of kids who start college don't finish ?even fewer from the inner city," Mr. Goldstein said. "So in the long run, the Match School defines by outcome: an educated high school grad must read, compute, persevere, organize and problem-solve well enough not just to attend college, but to graduate from college."

An education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Gerald Graff, said that Justice DeGrasse's ruling and the larger debate over what constitutes a sound education stemmed from the movement to raise school standards, and the inevitable back-and-forth over whether they are too high or too low. A combination of basic factual knowledge along with some ability to think critically is emerging as a compromise of sorts among traditional educators and those who want to experiment with new ideas.

"We still have a long way to go to get across to people in the schools and citizens that the kinds of testing we are doing and the standards we are applying emphasize the ability to think and argue rather than cramming minds with a lot of facts," Dr. Graff said.

The Rev. Joseph Parkes, a Jesuit priest who is the president of Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, holds up the study of the classics as a route to a sound and relevant education.

"The whole point of a liberal education is freedom," Father Parkes said. "People say, `Why do students at Fordham Prep study Latin and Greek? It's useless.' And I say it frees the mind and the heart. Jesuits still emphasize the classics, language, expression."

In the end, he said, graduates should go forth with "confidence, compassion and commitment so they can compete in a lot of areas. We want them committed to country, faith and family first, and committed to the world."

Those nurtured on books push them as tools critical to a basic education.

"When I was young, I was one of those people who read everything from `Huck Finn' to `The Red and the Black,' to novels like Sinclair Lewis's `Arrowsmith' and Sherlock Holmes," said Mr. Silvers of The New York Review of Books. "I feel that an enormous part of growing up is to have the appetite for omnivorous reading, trying one book after another."

The goal, Mr. LeClerc of the New York Public Library agreed, should be to instill "a love of lifelong learning."

"The single greatest contribution an educator can make is turning her or him onto more education, more learning," he said. "The first 16 or 20 years is a prelude. We don't stay in the same job all our lives, or the same careers. So you have to have an ability to adapt to rapidly evolving change."

Or as Dr. Sobol at Columbia said: "You need to train the intelligence more than was the case in an agrarian society. We don't clear forest and lay railroad track. We perform complex operations on a computer. You could be comfortable with a lower standard in that older world of my father and grandfather's time. You can't be comfortable with that now in my time."

Justice DeGrasse's ruling in the school financing case may not be the final word, as New York State decides whether to appeal and the State Legislature begins looking at how to come up with another financing formula. And all sides say they expect the debate over a sound, basic education to continue as well.

As Dr. Sobol noted, quoting Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."