I taught fourth grade for 22 years. I bought my own classroom supplies, I worked summers to make rent, and I watched kids I taught grow up to be the engineers and nurses this country runs on. My pension is fine, I'm not complaining about my life. But I will never understand a world where my lifetime of actual, essential work is worth less than one year of some hedge fund guy's carried interest. My problem is what we signal to children about which work matters. When the culture says the highest status belongs to whoever accumulates the most, we shouldn't be surprised when nobody wants to teach.
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