Why Do We Want Teachers to Stick Around Forever?
18th May 2011
Megan McArdle is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
It’s a romantic figure: the teacher who spends thirty or forty or sixty years patiently shepherding children through the tricky process of learning to read, or speak French, or do long division. The whole public school system is set up to reinforce this ideal. The pay system rewards seniority, the tenure system protects it, and the pension system exacerbates all of this….
Because teachers are the secular equivalent of nuns, and everybody expects nuns to work like dogs all their lives for chicken feed.