The average yearly salary of a teacher is about $45,000.
The lowest yearly pay of a professional Baseball player is about $180,000.
America obviously values education.
But, should the pay of a teacher be raised all that much?
Think about this: If a teacher’s anual salary is raised to an amount that would be considered wealthy, would the quality of our teachers go down? Would there be more people going into the profession simply for the money? People who don’t, at all, care about actually enlightening their students, and just go into the job for the pay?
Maybe a teacher’s pay being low ensures that the people who seek that profession really want the profession, and really want to teach, rather than anything involving economic gain. Someone must have to want to be a teacher to be in a classroom for eight hours a day, then have to go home and spend more time correcting papers and the like, right?
Is… that reason really good enough, though?
That same logic can then be used to justify any low-paying job. Every job in the US could lower its pay to minimum wage, and claim, “Well, we do it because we want to make sure the people we’re hiring really want the job.” – And, we all know that, that won’t ever work. There are a lot of highly paid professions that people go into because they want to. We, as a country, have hundreds of experts in many of them.
Why is it, then, that America “values education” so much, but people who can hit a ball with a stick and run around get payed multiple times of what the people who educate the country do? Someone who can throw a ball into a basket gets payed millions, while the person making sure our children can read and write has to live week-by-week.
We, as a country, seem to value entertainment far more than anything of importance. To be entertained is much more valuable than to be informed, or to be educated. Even the news has conformed to this concept. The news channels that have the most gossip, or the most coverage of some teenage pop-star’s life, gets the most ratings. Thus, said news channel makes more money. What channel would be silly enough to pass up the opportunity for more money!?
There is a war going on. There’s been a war going on for years. America has been in a war for years. A war. Our people go there, kill, and get killed. Though, I can assure you that, at any given moment, there will be ten times as much coverage on the life of Britney Spears than there is on any war we’re immersed into. And, if there is coverage on the war?
It’s not coverage. It’s an action movie.
We have a serious problem on our hands, and one that may not ever be fixed; no doubt, people would rather watch the Football game than fix the problem.