It is no secret that our education system has been fast plummeting for twenty years or longer. We regularly produce illiterate and innumerate graduates after thirteen years of expensive compulsory schooling, for whom the primary lessons have been how to manipulate vulnerable systems, how to bend themselves to a certain schema of thinking, and how to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Having said that, these are useful things when it comes to navigating the peculiarities of our present moment, but I would hardly suggest these are essential ingredients in forming a human being who knows what Aristotle called eudaimonia, the highest human good.

Despite all the talk of ‘de-factorying’ education, it is more a machine now than ever, having been entirely captured by the langue de bois, or wooden language, of corporate and bureaucratic newspeak, to say nothing of the complete victory of a certain metapolitical zeitgeist that now seems to dominate everything.

But this is a dead horse to flog: everybody knows the schools were captured long ago, even if the left act alternately smug and innocent about the fact, and conservatives seem to have had the fight neutered out of them a long time ago on this front, even when they’ve ostensibly held power. When the Abbott government tried to change some elements of the Australian curriculum, I seem to recall some skilful filibustering was undertaken by the federal education department, teacher unions, and the states.

I am less interested in the purely ideational elements of the destruction of education, though rest assured, you don’t introduce termites to a building and then expect architectural health. Many of the problems have to do with how things are done, as much as why things are done. Another time, we can look at the blue-haired teachers, and discuss how their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Teaching and education have been subject to the same influences that have been floating around for the last few decades, that read like something straight out of Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. The over-credentialed and under-educated management caste of our educational leaders is composed of people who read managerial textbooks for fun and appear to take them very, very seriously. They are victims of every idea freshly in vogue. If I had a dollar for every time they yapped about ‘data’, I’d be quite wealthy; but then they’d demand I create some kind of spreadsheet to account for it, so I’d rather go without. In short, the soul has gone out of the thing – out of teaching – a profession that seemingly no longer knows what it’s about.

Pick up and attempt to read a book by a mainstream expert of education; say, John Hattie. I’ll give you all those hypothetical dollars if you get past the first chapter. It’s one reason why everybody is trying to leave that profession, and why there is unlikely to be any improvement in sight. But weakness of ethos, leadership, and to be completely frank, brains, is only part of the problem.  Our education system has been scuppered by market forces that we unnaturally created in the last couple of decades.

Nonetheless, our best universities continue to rank well against their global peers. This I find baffling. I suspect, though cannot prove, that the attractiveness of Australia as an educational destination has more to do with certain other advantages, beyond receiving a robust education. For families in overseas countries, one in particular, having a son or daughter in overseas education is a toehold out in case things go belly up at home. This particular place tends to go belly up every generation or so, so it’s hard to blame them for that.

We can couple this with the fact that the universities stumbled across a wonderful business model, one that has more or less accepted that thirteen years of compulsory education is no longer enough, and it should be sixteen at a minimum. This ultimately is the legacy of the Dawkins Revolution. Where once a Year 10 certificate was enough, you now need a bachelor’s degree to do, well, anything. Certainly, you’ll need one to enter the middle class. Most university students are buying indulgences, rather than learning very much. Where credentialism, not education, sets the bar, I don’t expect you’ll see much interest in genuine knowledge, especially in the humanities. Which is a shame, because an elite that could grasp a literary reference, or think at all, would be a welcome change.

The real market force that has driven our downward spiral is that we are now content to look elsewhere for expertise if our own system can’t provide it. This we call the brain drain, and we regularly scalp talent from our neighbouring nations. That we create labour shortages through this mass importation, that then requires fresh labour to manage, trapping us in a cycle that has ramped up to the tune of half a million a year, seems a small price to pay. What this will eventually do to the fibre of our nation is anybody’s guess, because experiments of this scale haven’t been attempted before. We are living in a vast utopian experiment, driven by plutocrats on the one hand, who see matters only in terms of financial gain, and ideological zealots on the other, who see carpet-bombing both the past and the proximate as a religious mission.

Consistent with this model, we outsourced our manufacturing long ago. Increasingly it seems we’ve outsourced our education, too, despite appearances that things run the other way. While we might feel very clever importing foreign-educated professionals, the unwelcome side effect has been that the disintegration of our school system has been allowed to continue unabated, because we’ve been insulated from the immediate economic consequences. Thus the schools increasingly seem to function as pubs without beer, providing a valuable social service insofar as they enable women to participate in the workforce, which naturally is far more important than, say, raising their own children.

The real brain drain has happened in our own backyard, as we’ve lost any sense of rigour in our educational standards, as befits a society that has gone soft by every other metric, too.

Our education system has wrapped itself in bureaucratic bandages to manufacture the visage of life and competence, even as literacy and numeracy crater. Graduates of our benighted system might find their futures cleaning the toilets of those foreign-educated professionals who arrived as university students but remained as members of a new, cosmopolitan elite. It would make for something out of a Greek tragedy, supposing they could manage to read one.