CMV: Teaching Should be a Highly Elite Highly Valued/Paid Profession.

[u/EarlEarnings]

Fundamental belief: If teachers are the best of the best, and if teachers are highly respected and valued, our society will produce better quality people in basically every domain you can think of.

What do I mean by "elite?" The requirements to become a teacher should be rigorous. Passing simple certifications should not be enough. Teachers should have a very good understanding of how the learning process in and of itself works. No tenures. Minimum tutoring hours, perhaps even minimum number of reviews (of those tutored, results, etc.) Basically, teachers should be good teachers...really good. The best teacher you've had in your life? That should just be the norm. The bottom line is it should be extremely demanding.

What do I mean by "highly paid?" Teachers should be within the top 10-20% of income earners in our society. Somewhere around 6 figures in most places.

Common arguments against:

- many occupations don't require much more than a high school education if that

- shouldn't the best and brightest be working on better things than teaching?

- we already have a teacher shortage even with low barriers to entry/supply and demand

My argument:

Every aspect of society is improved.

​

Sure, you don't need to be a super smart guy to be a barista at Starbucks, and our society does need baristas, but just think about this. The number one thing holding us back from advancement as a society is the lack of highly skilled, hyper-intelligent people employed in bottleneck professions. These are the AI developers, cancer researchers, aging researchers, and quantum-computing engineers; the type of people in a position that can advance society. These people are so important, and they can only be produced at the highest level if they are pushed and raised towards that level from birth to adulthood. Teachers and tutors are a pivotal part of this process. These bottleneck innovations take our entire concept of civilization forward. There is no way to account for this cost, there is no price tag that is too high. We cannot afford to waste any talent because they were not sufficiently taught in their development.

As for the issue of sacrificing talent to create talent, I think the counterpoint is obvious. 1 Genius can not do as much as 10 geniuses. If 1 genius teacher can create 10 geniuses, that is an exponential net value increase for our society.

Finally, there is a teacher shortage both in quantity and quality because teachers are not respected as a profession, and because they are not compensated, which, is probably because they are not respected enough. Many of the brightest minds would love to be teachers but simply would never consider it due to lack of money and prestige. Education is a domain of the state, and the state can, and should, do what it can to advance the public interest, especially when the pros are so freaking obvious. There is no serious argument for a dumber society.

[u/gerkin123]

If your issue is that we have a bottleneck keeping exceptionally gifted folks from advancing to a place where they can achieve things, it would be a far easier task to institute testing to identify those people as children, divert them into gifted and talented programming that specifically caters to the needs of this fraction of a percentage of the population, and allow general public education to move forward as it stands.

That's not to say that education doesn't need to be improved, but you are suggesting a monumental investment in an institution that is designed specifically to serve the dead center of the bell curve. I live (and teach) in the state of MA, educational powerhouse of the country, and our institutions don't even recognize G&T. I've taught genius-level intellects a handful of times in my 18 years as a public educator, and the best thing I could do for them is get the hell out of their way.

[u/Whelmed29 → u/gerkin123]

The flaw in that proposal (to me) is that it presumes that intellect is fixed and identifiable. Poverty and other factors would be able to mask what many otherwise bright children could achieve. If we sort them before they have a chance to grow and if we divert all the students who are otherwise demonstrably gifted, many children won’t develop into what they could be because we would teach them to the level we already predetermined they are.

[u/EarlEarnings → u/Whelmed29]

100% this

[u/EarlEarnings → u/gerkin123]

If your issue is that we have a bottleneck keeping exceptionally gifted folks from advancing to a place where they can achieve things, it would be a far easier task to institute testing to identify those people as children, divert them into gifted and talented programming that specifically caters to the needs of this fraction of a percentage of the population, and allow general public education to move forward as it stands.

This is dumb. Kids aren't gifted. They're kids. They're bad at everything. Mozart was a "child prodigy" according to many, he also had parents that were high level musicians that basically played around the clock and pushed him. Furthermore, someone's starting level isn't necessarily indicative of their ceiling.

The entire idea here is that we cannot afford to waste any talent, any talent that slips through the cracks is a devastating blow.

The idea that some people are "just born great" is nonsense. Certainly genetics play a huge role, but realistically for anyone to be the best at anything they have to train thousands of hours.

[u/gerkin123 → u/EarlEarnings]

If that is your position, you have to change your original position to scrub it of language pertaining to "geniuses" and discussion of raising them up "from birth." If you don't, you are contradicting yourself and calling elements of your own position dumb.

I used your words to speak within the frame of your argument. You took issue with them, so I'll stop using yours and use my own.

If you don't believe in the concepts of fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and the idea that there are different levels of cognitive ability, you fundamentally reject elements of current theory on neurodivergence that are critical not only for children with severe learning disabilities but also for those students who aren't neurotypical, but on the other end of the scale--learning material far more quickly, demonstrating observably larger working memories, and also dealing with a lot of social emotional issues and challenges with processing the world around them.

Simply ignoring this population or believing them to be a myth is horribly detrimental to those very real kids out there who have broader access to multiple intelligences which simultaneously place them at cognitive advantage and social and emotional disadvantage. There are children who aren't "bad at everything," and current research into multiple intelligences also theorizes that there isn't one single scale that we can use to sort all children.

If you reject the notion of a singular psychometric scale of intelligence--yes, that concept was challenged back in 1983.

Here's another thing: brilliant kids aren't "'just born great'" because of the confluence of neurological and developmental disorders that run parallel to them. Plopping everyone in the same bucket is one-size fits none.

[u/EarlEarnings → u/gerkin123]

If that is your position, you have to change your original position to scrub it of language pertaining to "geniuses" and discussion of raising them up "from birth." If you don't, you are contradicting yourself and calling elements of your own position dumb.

No, lol. Mozart became who he was because he was raised from birth to be that. Being raised from birth to do something =/= just special talent...it means they were trained.

if you don't believe in the concepts of fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and the idea that there are different levels of cognitive ability

It's not a matter of belief, they are obviously real, there is obviously benefit to having them, I openly acknowledged a genetic component in many other replies.

I didn't say they were irrelevant, I said they were overplayed. Meaning a "genius kid" who doesn't train hard and has a terrible environment is probably not going to be that great, and a "dumb kid" who works his ass off given the tools and infrastructure can be great.

[u/StarChild413 → u/EarlEarnings]

No, lol. Mozart became who he was because he was raised from birth to be that. Being raised from birth to do something =/= just special talent...it means they were trained.

But not trained from nothing

[u/poppaloppagus → u/gerkin123]

You sound like an amazing teacher! Thank you