The passage answers which of the following questions?
Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.
The disgracefully low level of education in America today is the predictable result of a State-controlled school system. Schooling, to a marked extent, has become a status symbol and a ritual. More and more people are entering college – and fewer and fewer people are emerging properly educated. Our educational system is like a vast bureaucracy, a vast civil service, in which the trend is towards a policy of considering everything about a teacher’s qualifications (such as the number of his publications) except his teaching ability; and of considering everything about a student’s qualifications (such as his “social adaptability”) except his intellectual competence.
The solution is to bring the field of education into the marketplace.
There is an urgent economic need for education. When educational institutions have to compete with one another in the quality of the training they offer – when they have to compete for the value that will be attached to the diplomas they issue – educational standards will necessarily rise. When they have to compete for the services of the best teachers, the teachers who will attract the greatest number of students, then the caliber of teaching – and of teachers’ salaries – will necessarily rise. (Today, the most talented teachers often abandon their profession and enter private industry, where they know their efforts will be better rewarded.) When the economic principles that have resulted in the superlative efficiency of American industry are permitted to operate in the field of education, the result will be a revolution, in the direction of unprecedented educational development and growth.
Education should be liberated from the control or intervention of government, and turned over to profit-making private enterprise, not because education is unimportant, but because education is so crucially important.
What must be challenged is the prevalent belief that education is some sort of “natural right” – in effect, a free gift of nature. There are no such free gifts. But it is in the interests of statism to foster this delusion – in order to throw a smokescreen over the issue of whose freedom must be sacrificed to pay for such “free gifts.”
As a result of the fact that education has been tax-supported for such a long time, most people find it difficult to project an alternative. Yet there is nothing unique about education that distinguishes it from the many other human needs which are filled by private enterprise.