Midnight Thoughts: Society

Here’s a thought.

We live in a society of progressively maddening youth, and a clear distinction by the current and prior generation is seen through the contrasting outlooks on teachers. You may talk to parents, or their parents, who remember a time where teachers were held to a high esteem. Even today, many countries who seem to have the highest literacy rates, as well as rates of technological innovation, see teachers as a position of honour. So what happened in our side of the world?

This is something I like to call “profession inflation”, something which draws convenient parallels with the medical profession. In both teaching and medicine, the western world has seen a dire shortage, but the shortage has been tackled very differently for both professions (albeit a bit inaffective with tackling either regardless).

The first approach was with medicine, where over the last 20 years the growing population has needed more doctors, so the government has given the great price of… longer work hours and lower wages? Obviously, any sane person sees the flaws in doing so, starts to make you question… regardless: inaffective. We now have a shortage of doctors, met with difficulty in entering the profession, and a decline interest too, and so the profession has been made valuable for society. A bit too valuable even. Imagine if a farmer needed 10% more wheat to feed a population of his sheep, and had plentiful land, so decided to cut wheat production in half. His sheep now starve, and the farmer complains he doesn’t have enough wheat.

The second approach was with teaching, once, like medicine, highly honoured, and required growth to survive in a growing population. Here’s when the opposite happened… it was felt that allowing anyone to teach would solve the problem. It did solve the problem, about as effectively as a bankrupt government printing more money. More teachers isn’t the goal, it’s better teachers, which can not be achieved by devaluing the teacher with “profession inflation”, as this loses respect, and nor by false rarity (as with medicine) as this draws the passion away from the youth.

What should be done instead, is finding a balance between both worlds. Maintain the societal honour associated with a job, increase the competition, make it difficult, allow the best of the best to be out there to change lives of those with the most malleable minds, and allow whomever has such quality to join. But do not be excessive, keep the numbers with the needs, prevent their devaluing due to an excess, and pay well. This is not a matter of economic, the world is plenty rich, it’s mindset. The perspective of the people will dictate the future course, if the perspectives don’t change, and blind acceptance of flawed systems (as I have outlined) simply continue, we will not get very far before prescribing our own destruction.

Whilst I’m here, I do apologise for a lack of coherence, this was after all, a midnight thought. Goodbye. ;)