[nostrebored]

We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. Trigonometry didn’t make sense to me as a kid because I was learning from someone who didn’t understand it. They could memorize a lot of rules, but they didn’t understand it. In the face of this, what makes the most sense is fostering curiosity.

Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.

I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.

His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.

We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.

[vostok]

> We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be fixed by paying teachers more. Why would a smart person become a teacher if a professional industry job will pay $300-500k and a teaching job will pay $100k? Is paying teachers so much even palatable to the general public?

[mellavora]

You'd be lucky to find a teaching job paying 100K. According to this: https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...

salaries top out around 70K. That's ending salary, not starting salary.

And yes, this could be fixed by paying teachers more. And treating the profession with some respect.

[nostrebored]

The difference is starker than that. Principals make close to the amount that you’re estimating for teachers, and by structure most teachers will never be principals.

I wanted to go into teaching but stopped after I realized what that would mean for my long term earnings. Even with time taken off as a stay at home parent and time spent working in the developing world, I’m getting close to the lifetime earnings for teachers who progress in their careers. In less than a decade of working.

[BeFlatXIII]

It's not just pay. Teachers will willingly take pay cuts to teach at private schools. Why?

1. Students with chronic behavior problems are easier to throw out

2. Parents are less likely to go on idiotic crusades about the content of the curriculum

3. The school board (or, more likely, the state legislature) isn't going to make irrelevant changes to appease voters

Private schools are more likely to treat their teachers as independent professionals rather than glorified babysitters or McEducation employees.

[pjbeam]

I don't think pay would necessarily solve the problem though either (edit: I do support paying teachers quite a bit more just don't think that is a magical solution). I'm not a teacher, don't pretend to understand the nuances but there seems to be a nasty conflagration of political barriers to holding some combination of children/teachers accountable for outcomes. Probably something related to withholding finding or other perverse incentives. I'm sure I'm not the only person on HN who has left a very high paying job for a different one because of bad culture factors.