[defrost]

That's exactly why child care workers who look after packs of 15 to 20 kids at a time should be highly valued and paid a decent wage.

It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, hunting, clearing fields etc. in small ways.

It's a better use of labour than splitting every pair of adults into one for this type of work, the other always does child care.

[throwaway7ahgb]

I always tell my wife, if she wants to have a lot of kids we have only two options.

1) We move close to my or her family.

2) We get a lot more money.

I don't see anyway around it, we need family support or money to pay someone else to help.

[Libcat99]

All teachers should be well paid and well vetted. Teaching shouldn't be a self sacrifial social justice position, it should be an honored and well rewarded position.

[sirspacey]

Careful, you might get yourself into edtech. >-D

The average career length for teachers (not job, career) is 5 years and trending down.

The reason is not a secret: teaching is a brutal experience with sub-poverty wages. In most cases parents, students and the school administration are your adversaries. If it’s a public institution, political campaigns come crashing in annually with “us vs them” battles that make it awful no matter what side you are on.

It is not a job anyone should pursue.

[Viliam1234]

We should probably also redesign schools so that they need fewer teachers. For example, above certain age it is a waste of time if the teacher has to explain the same concepts over and over again to each class -- kids could instead watch a video, and then discuss it with the teacher.

Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.

People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.

If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.

[jampekka]

I'd guess they referred to the non-working parents contributing to the society by raising their children.

All contributions don't get paid, and all that get paid don't contribute.

[taskforcegemini]

raising wages doesn't equal better quality

[malfist]

But low wages certainly doesn't equal better quality.