Nobody wants to teach anymore

As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).

Watching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figure it out by themselves. It's almost as if our "invention of childhood" (as a protected phase in life) is being rolled back.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe kids can until they are quite old. On the contrary, I expect the emotional and psychological scars to demand a significant toll in the future.

[edit] PS: There have been quite a few very heated recent discussions where dang sternly warned against incisive political scorn. I agree, and my comment is intentionally worded carefully and as objectively as possible.

Great, let's move forward with some real online learning initiatives. The current system is antiquated and no longer makes sense from a purely educational perspective. For too long the US has used the school system as a baby-sitting service while both parents (or single parents) are at work.

A teacher should know better than making blanket statements every 2 lines with "Americans think..".

What a bad article.

s/to Teach/to be treated like shit for crap wages/g

Not exactly news, these days.

In much of America, local school districts still have quite a bit of autonomy. As thing keep getting worse, there might be a district or few, here & there, where a different approach gets an honest try.

Might.

People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need.

What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended.

I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.