True enough, but the quality of a society is partly determined by how good are your dregs.

As for teachers: they would be paid more if they did better. As it stands, trying to shift more money to the existing teaching class is rewarding appalling failure. They need to be fired as a class and something different put in their place. Perhaps with better selection and incentives preventing the inflation and denaturing that happened to education in the past 150 years – but whatever it is, it needs to be in place and demonstrating its value and virtues first, before any talk of feeding extra cash.

The problem of course is that most parents will scream bloody murder at the thought of having to actually raise their own kids. See the past year of COVID. Families forced to live together and spend time with each other proved an insupportable burden; they don’t want to do it, don’t know how, and don’t think they should be obligated to. They’ve so internalized the idea that they have a natural right to outsource family obligations to government bureaucrats and that no negative consequences of this choice can possibly be their own damn fault, it will not be possible to convince them otherwise.

The entire society is crashing on multiple levels. On one level, it’s awe-inspiring to behold. On another, as a kid who grew up reading about rocket ships and space colonies, it’s unbelievably infuriating.

Sounds like the Neocons and war/diplomacy. It’s a civilization-wide disease.

The problem we’ve really got going with academia here in the US is the disconnect between “reality as it is” and what we’re teaching the people in the schools. The sad fact is that most of the people doing the teaching these days are people who would be (or, actually were…) failures in the real world doing the jobs they’re teaching people to do.

The first time I encountered this unpleasant fact was as an experimental test subject for my mother’s education degree; the professor teaching child psychology and development at the University of Colorado Boulder was a life-long bachelor with no kids–But, boy howdy, did he know how to raise kids!

Not. As a kid, you spent ten minutes with that guy and around his little “labs”, you wanted to get the hell away from the creepy bastard as quickly as possible. I later looked up some of his material, and went over my mom’s class notes after finding them in storage during my teenage years, and I’m here to tell you, that was one weird dude with some very weird ideas.

And, think about that for a second: He never raised kids for himself, but he was teaching people all about how the minds of children developed and worked. It’s like “Yeah, I’m an expert on this, but I’ve never done it…”.

That sort of thing permeates much of our educational system. You have primary grade teachers trying to teach children how to read and write, but they’re unable to produce coherent English paragraphs of their own, and the patent illiteracy of their work products viewed in email and other such things is incredibly clear. If the average parent had a view into the intra-school traffic of your average school district, they’d probably attain sudden clarity as to exactly why Johnny can’t read: It’s because the teachers are ignoramuses.

We were talking yesterday about the American problem with producing decent and effective governance; this is an aspect of it. The root issue is that in America, smart ambitious people don’t go into things like teaching or public service. Those professions are filled, instead, with the dregs. We get what we deserve, because of the status, pay, and attention we pay to these crucial jobs. You want good teachers? Then, you’d better select them carefully, train them even more carefully, and pay them a decent salary. What we’re doing ain’t working, folks.