Education: are we getting value for money?

Education is one of the biggest ticket items in both State and Federal budgets. The question is does this expenditure represent value for money? Ever since the Dawkins 'reform' of the tertiary sector successive politicians at both State and Federal level have promoted a vision of education which sees education at all levels as little more than providing industry will a well trained and employable workforce. My argument is that this is inconsistent with a free market philosophy and demonstrates a failure to understand what role education plays in a democratic society.

I do not share the enthusiasm with which the Hawke and successive governments embraced the free market philosophy. It may well be therefore that my critique of education within the context of a free market ideology does not do it justice.

In essence the idea of a free market is that governments should not be in the business of picking winners and losers – instead they should allow the market to determine which industries are worthy of surviving. Agreed; this is a gross simplification but it is one of the most common responses that politicians offer when asked to intervene in the market. Example when the SA government contract for bus services was awarded to an interstate company the justification in part was that the government should not provide preferential treatment to SA based bus companies as this would represent an illegitimate interference in the operation of the free market.

So why does a free market ideology not work for the education sector? Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this is to refer to the teaching of languages other than English (LOTE). During the '80s and the '90s there was a considerable push for Australia to become export oriented. At the same time LOTE was suffering declining enrolments – in universities well establish language programmes were dismantled and in high schools staff began to question a commitment to LOTE for these classes were invariably smaller which in turn meant that class sizes in other subjects were well over recommended levels.

The demand for an export oriented economy, a promotion of tourism from countries from outside the English speaking world meant that LOTE teachers were able to push for more LOTE teachers.

Few policy makers had the critical capacity to think through this argument logically – which meant that the task for LOTE advocates such as myself had a relatively easy time convincing Ministers that the promotion of LOTE was in our economic interest.

The educational arguments for LOTE are far stronger than any free market rhetoric but when you are battling for a slice of the education budget you have to work from within the dominant economic paradigm. The economic arguments for LOTE based on free market principles is, like all educational arguments based on such principles is fatally flawed for a number of reasons.

Firstly it requires governments to pick winners and losers. These winners and losers do not have to be picked in the short term but have to be picked based on analysis of where the world will be at least 20 years from now.

How so?

Lets look at the example of the teaching of Japanese to understand this. In the late '70s indications were that Japan was to play an increasing large part in our economy – we were busy developing Japanese export markets and were wooing the Japanese to choose Australia as a tourist destination.

However, Japanese was not taught in statistically significant numbers at any level in the education system. To promote the teaching of Japanese one needed to get more teachers of Japanese in schools. This meant that one needs to expand the teaching of Japanese in the tertiary sector. This itself takes time – at the time I estimated that it would take about 10 years before we would have sufficient programmes at tertiary level to make a difference.

Once there were sufficient courses at tertiary level you would need a further 4 years to begin producing teachers. Once these teachers are in schools they will need to be teaching the language for at least 5 years to get students up to a required standard of proficiency. So the turn around time for a curriculum policy change to begin to bite is about 20 years. That time line may be shortened for some subjects but it will generally fall in the range of some 10-20 years.

The reason Japanese is a good example is that with the benefit of hindsight we would have been far better off to invest in Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic than Japanese. To make that change now would mean of course that we would still be 20 years behind the mark and who knows which countries are dominant 20 years from now? In fact for a government to pick a language would mean that Governments have the capacity to differentiate between winners and losers so it would make their free market record sound hollow indeed.

Teachers of languages, however, have a powerful fallback position. A bilingual person will pick up a third and fourth language much quicker – indeed in many countries around the world it is a commonplace to teach students a number of languages and it is on the back of that research that it has become apparent that it does not matter a great deal which language you teach as long as you teach a second or a third language you are nurturing in students a capacity to learn languages.

I suggest that there are at least two arguments embedded that act against the free market theory of education. The first is that it is inconsistent with the philosophy of not picking winners. For if the purpose of education is to provide what employers need then someone will have to be able to look in a crystal ball and anticipate what those needs will be in 20 years time.

Closely related to this is the idea that education must be vocationally oriented. This is a project doomed to failure – students entering the education system today will be competing for jobs that have not even been invented yet. If we do not know what the job market will demand in 12 or 15 years time how can we give students entering the system today what they need? How can we ensure that we are getting value for money?

The availability of low cost universal education has one obvious merit – it effectively doubles the workforce by providing about 12 years of largely tax payer funded child care. But there is a far stronger justification for free or at least low cost public education. Whilst we may not be able to identify the particular jobs that people will do we can identify the sort of skills they will need to be productive members of society.

In general terms this means that a balanced curriculum will develop both cognitive and motor skills. Secondly we should also realise that once the basic cognitive and motor skills have been developed it should be possible to identify people's potential strengths and seek to develop these – again here there should be no bias in preferring one set of skills over another. A person with an aptitude for engineering is as important as one with an aptitude for dance. All that is important is that we provide free education for as long as it is clear that the person is benefitting from that education.

In an ideal world education systems produce well educated misfits who are capable of looking at our society with a jaundiced critical eye. For if the burdens and benefits gained from social co-operation are to be fairly distributed we need a population that is capable of assessing the range of options open to government. It means a population that is prepared to challenge the wisdom of 'experts' and demand that their expertise be expressed in terms that enable the non expert to evaluate their advice.

But what about the vocational needs? We want our Plumbers, and Lawyers, Doctors and Mechanics to be actually qualified to do their work. That is true but that is a far cry from the current pre-occupation with measuring and defining every role in society. If we get our society of well educated misfits then I venture to suggest the vocational needs can be allowed to take care of themselves.