1) Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.
2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
> Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.
Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered.
> How little do you pay babysitters?
In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases.
Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?
$1 per student in a 25-student classroom for 30 hrs/week for 36 weeks is like 27k, the base salary isn't much higher than that. So that's assuming a worthless teacher with 0 added value. The added value is probably at least 3x even for a subpar teacher up to 10-20x for a top performer and the actual time variables are all probably higher than listed above.
I would imagine the 10-20x value-adders aren't incentivized and are probably actively de-incentivized in the faculty senate/union dynamic unless they literally love the job that much which is debunked in the OP post.
Teaching as a career basically doesn't exist anymore outside of schools for children. It is not that teachers are using automated tools, but students are using automated teachers instead of hiring human teachers. When was the last time you hired a human teacher instead of consulting an automated teacher when you wanted/needed to learn something new?
Like I said before, we don't even recognize the existence of general teachers anymore, with the word under typical use now only referring to those who work at schools for children.
Books provide a primitive form of automated teaching, although we've expanded on the concept considerably since the advent of the book.
You have not heard of automated teaching as a thing because we invent names for automation. The automated kitchen servant isn't called an automated kitchen servant, it's called a dishwasher (among others).
Likewise, automated teachers are not called automated teachers. They are given names, depending on the teaching method at play. Automated teacher is used here as a generalization as the specific automation is immaterial.
2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.