
Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake - jseliger
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-war-on-public-schools/537903/?utm_source=atltw&amp;single_page=true
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teslabox
> That many top college graduates hesitate to join a profession with low wages
> is no great surprise. For many years, talented women had few career
> alternatives to nursing and teaching; this kept teacher quality artificially
> high. Now that women have more options, if we want to attract strong
> teachers, we need to pay competitive salaries.

It's not just that other professions pay better: teaching is a sort of
"mission impossible" that breaks everyone but the most dedicated and
enthusiastic.

My high school biology teacher was an excellent teacher. Everything about his
style was enthusiastic. He retired at 55 years old and became a real estate
agent. I saw him a few years later, and asked why he gave it up. He said he
wanted to go out at the top of his game. He didn't want to become one of those
teachers who goes to work because they need the money. All students are
apathetic about some of their classes. I think it bothered my poor high school
geography teacher that no one actually cared about her class.

I don't think many people realize that "traditional" public schools are
themselves an experiment that was never evaluated. This article talked about
the first public schools, but doesn't comment on the actual details: these
were one-roomed schoolhouses with a single teacher. _This_ is a 'traditional'
public school, not the factory schools the industrialists gave us [1].

[1] my comment on the myth of the superiority of age-segregated classrooms:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760)

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cpr
John Taylor Gatto (NY State Teacher of the year 1990) would beg to differ, and
has amassed a fairly extensive set of arguments:

[https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-
Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/](https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/)

