2 ms·

well said. If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compens

well said. If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation. Professions that are a natural part of human life and thus simultaneously enjoyable and in demand as a career for a lot of the population will always have lower salaries. Like all careers, there is a competitive marketplace and many components to compensation. And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them. And if they are not, perhaps we should not be entrusting out children to them. Of course, none of this applies to a unionized situation. The pay is dependent on how much political pressure can be applied not on mutual benefit.

loewenskind 16y ago
>If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation. I wish people would stop trotting this nonsense out all the time. It's not specifically a myth or a fallacy but rather an occurrence so rare as to be useless. Worse, it's usually presented by people trying to justify paying too little for a given job. There are simply not enough people willing to forgo a nice comfortable middle class lifestyle just to be able to pursue their passion of teaching children. And why would they? Most people probably have more than just one passion, so why choose the one that pays the worst (not to mention dealing with passion-killing bureaucracy day by day)? As a result, the US public school system actually gets made up of a mix of genuinely passionate teachers and people who see it as a safe government profession where they have to read silly books to stupid kids all day. In my experience, the mix heavily favors the latter. >And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them. They have. That's why the people best at teaching are usually somewhere they can be compensated for it. Are you seriously suggesting the people we should be entrusting our children to are the lowest bidders? If these people are passionate and don't care about keeping up with the Jones' then there are probably other places they could donate their time that don't have such miserable politics to deal with.

loewenskind 16y ago

>If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation. I wish people would stop trotting this nonsense out all the time. It's not specifically a myth or a fallacy but rather an occurrence so rare as to be useless. Worse, it's usually presented by people trying to justify paying too little for a given job. There are simply not enough people willing to forgo a nice comfortable middle class lifestyle just to be able to pursue their passion of teaching children. And why would they? Most people probably have more than just one passion, so why choose the one that pays the worst (not to mention dealing with passion-killing bureaucracy day by day)? As a result, the US public school system actually gets made up of a mix of genuinely passionate teachers and people who see it as a safe government profession where they have to read silly books to stupid kids all day. In my experience, the mix heavily favors the latter. >And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them. They have. That's why the people best at teaching are usually somewhere they can be compensated for it. Are you seriously suggesting the people we should be entrusting our children to are the lowest bidders? If these people are passionate and don't care about keeping up with the Jones' then there are probably other places they could donate their time that don't have such miserable politics to deal with.