Jon, the problem with your rationale is that the free market has nothing to do with philosophy, which implies humanistic thought.
Education follows suit; it's not about humanism, but indoctrination into free-market ideology--please note the distinction between ideology and philosophy, one is voluntary and the other is not.
The further problem with your article is that it questions the logic of the system, as though the system's inconsistencies were objectionable, when it's very legitimacy as a model "worthy of reform" ought to be what's objectionable. If the system has proven anything, it's that it is incapable of reform. In continuing to object to its inconsistencies, we legitimise it! There comes a point where the rhetoric will no longer wash, where the criticism is merely part of the discourse, and the garment must be dispensed with rather than darned.
This is where OLO and co perform a disservice; they keep the chatter going, as if anyone took any notice; as if the by and large conservative cohort of OLOers were interested in change. They're not; their interest is in self-preservation, that is in salvaging their tired ideologies, which they've invested so heavily in all their lives.
The education system in this country is pathetic; worse, it's a joke; it turns out drones and morons, incapable of self-reflection, let alone philosophy!
Primary school could be immediately dispensed with if parents committed to spending an hour reading with their kids twice a week. Half an hour on maths! High school could be similarly cut down to one day a week spent on political philosophy. That would spell the end of reform, which is why the powers that be keep hammering away at pedagogy.

John
The argument on which you base your conclusion against the free market is:
• Government pushed for greater export orientation of industry
• Government-funded universities did not have LOTE teachers commensurate with that first policy
• Government employees, being LOTE teachers, were then able to press government Ministers for more government funding.
• To know whether government policy provided value for money, government tried to pick winners and losers.
• Government did and does not have the knowledge necessary to do that.
• Government had decided that education should be “vocationally oriented”, which in effect sacrificed other, more important values.

It is a mystery why you think you have made a case against free market anything, because all the problems and actions that you discuss have to do with government control of educational services: government funding, government policies, government employees, government decisions.

You are right that such things are inconsistent with a free market ideology; but wrong to conclude that ANY aspect of it amounts to “embracing the free market philosophy”.

Free market means the opposite:- those who want to buy, and those who want to sell a particular educational service do so, and government does not determine funding, prices, content, qualifications, attendance, beneficiaries or anything else - except enforce the law of contract and fraud.

Therefore in a discussion of free market theory of education, it is incompetent to fail to distinguish between actions by private service providers, and by government. For example you say “there was a considerable push for Australia to become export oriented”.

*By whom*?

If it was by government, then that is *not* a critique of the free market, obviously.
And if it was by private firms, under a free market philosophy, everyone else in the population should not be forced into paying for benefits for private firms.
For government to decide that education is primarily about vocational training, backed up by compulsion to fund, license, qualify, and compel attendance, is *not* a free market philosophy, it is a statist, interventionist, central-planning philosophy.

(Cont.)

Government services always involve a split between paying for a service and receiving it. And it this split, not the free market, that has caused *all* the problems you have identified, which are only classic economic problems of central planning.

What values and content should education be teaching? Why should a small elite get to decide on behalf of everyone else? How could they possibly have the knowledge necessary to know what would be best for each individual affected by their one-size-fits-all decision? What is to stop them substituting their own personal or irrelevant values? Who pays the costs if they are wrong? Why should everyone else be forced to pay for benefits to employers? What about other important educational values that are not vocational?

These are issues which are peculiar to governmental provision; they do not arise in a free market for education.

And given that governmental provision is not to run under profit and loss, how is government going to calculate whether it’s getting value for money, considering the competition for the same resources from other important values such as hospitals, roads, law and order, and so on?

It is confused to call any government service “free”. They cannot be free, because the resources to pay for them must be withdrawn from other valued employments to which society would put them.

The fact that government services are paid for under compulsion proves irrefutably that social value was destroyed in the process, but what is the proof that any greater value was created? There is none.

So the answer to your question “are we getting value for money?” is:- No.

All the arguments that government does or can provide better educational outcomes are based on fallacies, which are completely refuted here:
http://mises.org/journals/jls/19_2/19_2_5.pdf
(Interesting note: the author of the article was 16 years old when he wrote it.)

I have to agree with some of your critics, John; I can’t really see much in the way of ‘free market’ principles in contemporary education. That being said, I accept that we don’t get value for money from education. And I wholeheartedly support LOTE as a powerful vehicle for intellectual development.

Primary school education isn’t all that complicated. Fundamentally, it’s about skills (language and maths, mostly), and culture. It’s NOT about ‘values’ -- that’s far too fuzzy a concept, and far too easily manipulated. We learn values from family, and from those myths and stories which define our culture. Education used to incorporate the latter, but no longer, and that’s a great pity. Nothing teaches ethics to humans faster, and more effectively, than story. Nothing is LESS effective than hectoring lectures about the importance of abstractions like multiculturalism, tolerance, and ‘diversity’.

At Secondary level, students begin to differentiate. Everyone needs a little science, some will need a lot. Civics has been left out ... teachers aren’t really up to doing the subject justice anyway. It’s plain stupid to encourage all students to attend university; only a few are ready, many will never be. Any university lecturer knows that the best students are ‘mature-aged’. At 18, most young people are looking for a salary, independence, and love (the latter can be real or feigned, initially). They’ll have careers at least 50 years long, and most will want to change jobs by the time they’re in their mid-30s or early 40s. They should be encouraged to do so; by then, the’ll have enough life experience to KNOW what they’re good at, and want to do for a career. Finally, they’re ready to learn. The best managers and engineers are the ones who started off learning a trade.

LOTE needs to begin early. We don’t need Japanese or Mandarin to chat to our trading partners; we need it to learn how to think outside the square. Every language represents a different way of interpreting the basic concepts which make up our personal world. Having only one is like having only one eye.

Perhaps my comment above seems critical of John Ton's article, but it was really facetiously approving, so I'll have another go. I agree that <In an ideal world education systems produce well educated misfits who are capable of looking at our society with a jaundiced critical eye>. This is precisely what is missing in our schools; instead, children are tacitly taught that current institutions form an inevitable and timeless backdrop--the best of all possible worlds--to their lives. There's no rigour in the humanities at all--there's precious little of it at the tertiary level, which is now also virtually exclusively devoted to supplying an off-the-rack workforce and professionals--from business to science--dedicated to the system and its free-market ideology--which is and will continue to come increasingly to the fore.
Just as being bilingual facilitates the easy uptake of other languages, so do the three R's prepare the mind for diverse other appropriations of learning. That's why I think most of school is redundant and could be qualitatively replaced with a fraction of the time devoted to the honing of genuine literacy and numeracy ("the ratio, literacy/illiteracy, hasn't changed, it's just that now some illiterates can read"). All the other "cultural" programmes amount to Panglossian toadying.
It matters greatly of course what children read--Voltaire's "Candide" should definitely be read as a bed-time story to youngsters--a diet of rhetoric and political philosophy from an early age being fundamental.
John Ton's is dead right, what our society desperately needs is a generation of "well educated [well read] misfits", rather than commodities off an assembly line--drones incapable of radical thought, which is what the world desperately needs.
The neoliberalism of recent decades has made a fetish of "career paths"; no job is so menial that it can't be styled a vocation; its ignorant drudge, rewarded and patronised an artisan, grows out of his youth to become an embittered miscreant or, more likely, a pathetic celebrant of the philosophically-impoverished culture that nurtured him.

Squeers
"There's no rigour in the humanities at all-"

That's rich coming from you. Your whole critique of capitalism is based on your simple failure to distinguish between private and public ownership of the means of production - the most basic confusion. You just label anything you don't like as capitalist, regardless whether or not it is done by government, as you have just done here. Government compels the funding, attendance, qualifications of teachers, and content - and you criticise that arrangement as biased towards the free market!

You are hardly an advertisement for rigour in the humanities.