Moral meaningfulness has zero to do with economic value.
Literally everyone alive is capable of teaching at some level. And the education requirement to teach higher levels is not as complicated or long as many other professions.
So lots and lots of qualified or easily qualifiable candidates for a position equates to a lower economic value for that position.
Any other outcome would be both economically and morally perverse.
No. To teach in a school in Australia you would normally need a degree plus some educational qualification, typically a postgraduate Diploma of Education. The absolute fastest time to obtain this normal level of education is four calendar years. This is not "walk in" job. It's a professional career with a significant formal training requirement.
(Source: One of my parents worked at a teacher's union, many of my friends are teachers, and I too studied teaching briefly)
Half of all adults in Australia have a 4 year degree. To add a specialization in education and meet the requirement it's just another year for those people. Hence, "easily qualifiable".
As the salary increases, the pool of potential and interested applicants rises dramatically.
That's the problem with vague subjective statements: shifting goalposts in conversation. Being "right" is less important than saying something useful and verifiable.
From my perspective I haven't moved any goalposts. I'm only adding specificity to what I already said.
I didn't make it more specific before because I don't care to spend all day typing on my phone. If this is a conversation, we'll slowly make progress to reaching a shared understanding of each other's viewpoint and at what level of ambiguity we agree or disagree at.
To that end, this isn't a debate, it's an exploration of perspectives, each round adding specificity.
Given that we're talking about a hugely macroeconomic issue, my definition of "easily" is even more broad than what I've presented here. At the end of the day, my point is just that there's a mutlidimensional spectrum of pay versus education requirements vs potebtial applicants that exists. A century ago, kids were being taught similar subjects by people who lacked any degree at all. So the licensing requirements are pretty arbitrary, likely an artifact of regulatory capture by teachers unions to preserve formerly relatively high standards of loving. That has changed of course but the barrier hasn't.
The amount of flexibility in delivering sufficient education to kids is WAY more than in building bridges for instance because our ability to measure quality is greater in engineering fields than in education.
Literally everyone alive is capable of teaching at some level. And the education requirement to teach higher levels is not as complicated or long as many other professions.
So lots and lots of qualified or easily qualifiable candidates for a position equates to a lower economic value for that position.
Any other outcome would be both economically and morally perverse.