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Page 96
specially talented are always few. This is a special case of the general tendency for people to seek to collude to fix prices, whether through unions or industrial monopolies. But collusive agreements will generally be destroyed by competition unless the government enforces them, or at least renders them considerable support.
If one were to seek deliberately to devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, he could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structures that has developed in the larger city and state-wide systems. It is perhaps surprising that the level of ability in elementary and secondary school teaching is as high as it is under these circumstances. The alternative system would resolve these problems and permit competition to be effective in rewarding merit and attracting ability to teaching.
Why has governmental intervention in schooling in the United States developed along the lines it has? I do not have the detailed knowledge of educational history that would be required to answer this question definitively. A few conjectures may nonetheless be useful to suggest the kinds of considerations that may alter the appropriate social policy. I am by no means sure that the arrangements I now propose would in fact have been desirable a century ago. Before the extensive growth in transportation, the "technical monopoly" argument was much stronger. Equally important, the major problem in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was not to promote diversity but to create the core of common values essential to a stable society. Great streams of immigrants were flooding the United States from all over the world, speaking different languages and observing diverse customs. The "melting pot" had to introduce some measure of conformity and loyalty to common values. The public school had an important function in this task, not least by imposing English as a common language. Under the alternative voucher scheme, the minimum standards imposed on schools to qualify for approval could have included the use of English. But it

 
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