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Originally Posted by btimbit
I have a cousin that's a teacher, and she's a great person, very smart, taught in France for a year, speaks 3 languages fluently. But all she's done in her life is be involved in education, from going through school, right to teaching it. The result? She's weird, has a very skewed view of the world, doesn't really understand a lot of social and economic issues and gives terrible advice to people.
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That's pretty common. I grew up and went to school with a lot of people who went into teaching and other communications-oriented fields. Many are still friends today. In my experience, people who study literature and art and sociology typically do everything they can to avoid courses on economics. In journalism school, we needed to do a special section on statistics (a week or so of classes) to try equip students who had avoided that stuff all their lives with some grasp of empiricism. And for teachers, that ignorance doesn't go away once they enter their professions, because their contracts are set up so they don't have to ever make any individual choices about investment and retirement planning. It's all handled automatically.
The upshot is that among our educated populace, teachers are among the most ignorant about how capitalism and market economy work. About budgets and interest and trade and taxation. It contributes to the neglect in our K-12 education system about those subjects.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos
You could also say that if fires don't happen, what is the point of firemen at all? Talk about an overpaid bunch of lazy public servants, firemen would be, if fires didn't exist.
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Actually, firefighters are lazy and overpaid. Do you know how few genuine fires there are in Calgary these days? How little work firefighters do in a typical week? How many of them double-dip with other jobs, and how young they retire? Many municipalities in Canada, especially in the older parts of the country, face fiscal ruin due to the salary and pension commitments to police and firefighters.
The $100,000 club: Who’s really making big money these days
Canada’s new upper class: firefighters, police officers, teachers
A nation of $100,000 firefighters
And $100K may not seem a lot to Calgarians. But nationally, where the average salary in Canada is $38K, it puts you in the top 6 per cent. And that's not even taking into account the defined benefit pension plans, and retiring 5-10 years younger than Canadians in the private sector.