Teachers & Pay Scales

You always hear about how teachers are underpaid – that they deserve more money because the job they do is so important, they have so much education they have to maintain, and whatever else. And those who say all that may well be right.

But you know what? I kinda think that, overall, we’re better off keeping teachers a little underpaid. You always here about teachers who teach “because [they] love it.” Frankly, those are the people I want teaching my kids (assuming I had any), and as long as we underpay teachers, that’s pretty much the only people we’re going to have teaching. If you make this career field pay the way some people believe it ought to, you start getting people doing the job just for the check, and who really thinks that’s the kind of folks we want trying to educate our kids?

Remember, your pension/Social(ist) Security benefits are fully dependent on ensuing generations keeping the economy running at a fairly high pace over the long term. There will always be the occasional recession, but there’s no reason they need to be all that deep or all that prolonged, but we need to have reasonably well-informed people filling the various jobs in the economy and, perhaps more importantly, pulling the levers in the voting booth. Kids whose teacher was just working for the weekend won’t be the sort of folks we want running things.