Teacher's job is no doubt stressful. Therefore I think we must invent new ways of automating the teaching, amplify the powers of a single teacher. That way there will be enough teachers to provide for every child. Not sure how to get there.
But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.
You, like most people, fundamentally misunderstand what teachers do.
You cannot amplify the powers of a single teacher because that's not how CHILDREN function.
The children's need for 1-on-1 human interaction to support their development is the fundamental bottleneck. The reason class sizes matter is because they directly affect the quantity of direct interaction each child receives.
We already automate things and amplify somewhat the power of a teacher... We've been trying computer stuff for decades (and books before). You still need tons of teachers.
Having been thorough some schools I think the biggest impediment was that teachers didn't really get what I didn't get, my mis-conceptions.
A recent student might be able to better understand what the obstacles in leaning might be since they have been through it themselves.
The idea of Learning-By-Teaching seems to be that students learn better when they try to express the subject matter so clearly that others can understand it too. But it might also compsensate for the lack of teachers, that students can be teachers to other students.
Or, and hear me out: we could cut our military budget (which is larger than the next ten or so countries combined, both total and per capita) and start tipping the corporate tax share back towards the ~%50 it was sixty years ago and magically be able to:
* pay teachers a fair wage
* hire enough teachers, assistants, and admins so that teachers don't have to work at least another half a workday 'off the books'
* fund schools well enough that teachers don't have to pay out of pocket for basic supplies like chalk and paper
* feed our children a proper meal at lunch by default, instead of making them pay for a crappy meal (unless their busy parents jump through hoops to prove they're poor enough)
One of the strangest things for me as a private school student coming from the public school system was being able to go into the lunch line, get what food I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not have to pay for it. No worries about losing the lunch money I'd been given, getting beat up for my lunch money, etc.
The US is usually in the top 3 spending per student (beaten only by small countries that represent statistical outliers like Norway or Luxemburg), so really, it spends the most. Yet, as many are quick to point out, all that money results in educational outcomes well below many European countries and also many Asian countries that spend far, far less.
Luckily, this is researched extensively, and schools must publish budgets. Typically, spending on 'instruction' is >60% of the expenditures, almost all of that is salaries and benefits. Capital outlay is usually around 8-10%, support services and administration around 10%, operations and maintenance around 10%, and around 5% for transportation/bussing.
Contrary to the typical claims that 'administration' or capital costs suck up all the money, the majority of the money does go to teachers' salary.
The US is just a pretty expensive country. The cost of labor (highly correlated with wages) is pretty high compared to Europe even outside the coastal cities. Maybe not 4x though.
It would also be interesting to compare educational outcomes in particular US states to particular European countries. I suppose that the quality of education may be as unevenly distributed across the US as it is across Europe.
Ah yes the ol' "Let's just cut the military budget" position.
Teachers salaries are 100% a local issue. If you want to raise their salary then vote to increase taxes in your county. Teachers are state employees. The states governments are more than capable enough to solve these issues since they are local issues.
To be fair, state and local governments would have to increase the total tax burden on their populace to increase education funding, or makes cuts to other things in their domain. The federal government could certainly cut the military budget and grant those funds to state or local education programs, without increasing anyone's tax burden.
That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.
And don't forget, military needs teachers as much as anybody. When there's no war soldiers are on stand-by. What do they do? They train, which is really a form of education. They could learn many things besides how to use weapons. They could learn how to be teachers when they are ready to leave the military. :-)
How can you say "No, it's not," when OP provided a very clear definition of how they're measuring ("both total and per capita") and you provided a completely different one ("as a percentage of GDP").
>USA's military spending in 2021 hit $801bn a year, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In comparison Russia's military spending in 2021 hit only $66bn.
US population: 329.5 million, Russian population: 144.1 million,
Per capita spending US: $24,600. Russia: $458
While I’m at it: US GDP: 20.94 trillion, 1.483 trillion
US military spending as percent of GDP: 3.8%, Russia: 4.5%
And “not near the top of spending per GDP” is not really an accurate assessment. From this data https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/defense-s... we can see that the countries with higher spending per GDP fall into one or more of the following categories:
- smaller, poorer countries
- countries involved in active military conflicts or with active military conflicts near them
This is simply a math fail, or not recognizing that the combined GDP of "Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia" doesn't even come close to the GDP of the United States.
A public school in America (but not in England) is a state run school which may or may not have free lunches (it's often income related), Private schools are ones you pay to go to and tend to charge for food or order out for food.
It’s not often income-related, it’s always income-related. All public schools offer free/reduced price lunches and even schools in high-income areas will have some small number of students who qualify:
I would have said that but for the email I recently got informing me that all students were getting free lunchs in my son's district. I think it's a covid related state program maybe?
I’m not saying you’re wrong but it surprises me that there are many countries in Europe with no (or even very few) private schools - are you thinking of Former soviet bloc countries?
But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.