Education: are we getting value for money?

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.