Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: Female teachers?

WTF?
TB — (archived)

During my generation, and most of the one before me, male teachers were as rare as hen's teeth. I had a grand total of one--in sixth grade. I doubt my parents had any at all.

Yet somehow we built the greatest technological civilization on the planet. Every invention of the past fifty years came from someone who probably had female teachers until college.

Go figure.

I've looked at the expenses of the modern public school system. Costs per student in constant dollars have gone up three times since 1961. Teacher salaries, also in constant dollars have only gone up by a factor of 1.5. You tell me where the money is going. Better education? The schools prior to 1961 (and post-1930, come to that) were the ones that put men on the Moon.

My own personal experience with my children's teachers was of hard-working people, most of them women, who bent over backwards to make things work, including paying for school supplies out of their own pocket--the ones parents didn't have to buy. When I was a kid, and school expenditures were far less, the first day of school was about opening your desk and looking at the new boxes of crayons, rulers, pencils, and other things that the school gave us.

Go figure.

You want to locate the problems with our education system, you need to look some distance above the teacher's pay grade. You need to look at people in our education system and our government who have never seen a student close up. This is a systemic problem, and the miracle is that our teachers do as well as they do under the circumstances.

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