It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.
They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.
Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.
How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?
And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.
There's also a bit of a principal-agent problem. The people who make decisions about the educational system are state bureaucrats, teachers, and parents, in roughly that order. The one person who's most affected by it - the kid - has basically zero say in anything.
I suspect that education would be a much higher priority and teachers would be paid much more if children could vote.
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It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.
They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.
Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.
How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?
And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.
The tax base that funds the schools depends on the whims of capitalism.
There's also a bit of a principal-agent problem. The people who make decisions about the educational system are state bureaucrats, teachers, and parents, in roughly that order. The one person who's most affected by it - the kid - has basically zero say in anything.
I suspect that education would be a much higher priority and teachers would be paid much more if children could vote.
If children could vote and direct funds then school would rapidly become a cross between a candy-store and a hotel Spa.