!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
The GOP is fully to blame.
They sell the American public on the idea that any taxes are bad, no matter what they are meant to fund. When they are in power they cut public services, give tax breaks to corporations, and schedule tax raises to occur when they’re out of power.
When they aren’t in power they yell about taxes nonstop to make sure democrats are too scared to re-fund them, so they don’t get voted out.
Cycle after cycle, and now there’s no money to give the teachers.
There's also the feedback loop where they point at the broken underfunded public services and are like "see how shit public services are? They're a waste of taxes. We could gut them to save you money"
They've conditioned people to be so against taxes that you have a significant portion of the public saying things like, "why should my taxes fund public schools if my children graduated 20 years ago?"
This country is full of rotten people.
I've heard people say this with my own IRL ears. It's completely indefensible.
One of their main arguments against taxes is that government will always waste tax dollars due to corruption and incompetence... Which is a self fulfilling prophecy, as they've proven to be some of the most corrupt and incompetent political leaders in history.
That's by design
A dumb population is easier to control, which is why Republicans since Reagan have been slashing education whenever possible, trying to inject theocracy on there as much as possible, because religious dumb fucks are even easier to control
That cutting salaries helps them with their greed is just a cherry on top of the vomit cake
L
That cutting salaries helps them with their greed is just a cherry on top of the vomit cake
L
/r/redditsniper OH SHIT THEY'VE HIT LEMMY NOW
The answer is always greed.
Teachers tend to like teaching. It's a rewarding, "feel good" career. You know that you are helping kids, you get to watch them at their best. And, yes, sometimes at their worst, too, but that's part of the deal - like watching your puppy chew up your couch and shit on the floor. Still worth it.
Since teachers tend to be passionate, they put up with a lot of bullshit admin/management. Moreso than you might at a soulless corporate job. This isn't limited to teachers, either. Consider other careers where people put up with bullshit, and you'll see a lot of parallels.
Art is a great parallel example. Everyone loves great art, artists love making art - but many people don't want to pay for art. That's why there's so many passionate actors and musicians, but so few of them manage to eke out a living as a true professional. The passion is there, they are driven by their love of art, not by the material rewards.
The business world loves to take advantage of passion.
Let me tell you a story about a man named Ronald Reagan.
the actor!?
Who's the president in 1985?!
George Carlin said it best. We want dumb happy obedient workers. Smart enough to runthe machines, but not smart enough to realize how badly they're getting fucked by the system. So don't count on the schools to do much more than basic math, and basic skills. Because what helps the elite class screws over the working class. It's best to start screwing them in kindergarten. Teach them the pledge of allegence, so they feel endebted to our system, and keep them there for their entire lives.
Paraphrasing here, but that's the jist of a routine he had in the 90s. The important thing to note is that Carlin was NOT a time traveler. He didn't predict the future. It's just that we as a society have had the same problems for 100 years, and we never fixed our shit.
Maybe because 98.1% keep voting for either evil or the lesser evil; but almost none of them vote for the good like Nader?
"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and American universities - and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, […] you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public." – George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBrbXOmnW70
"It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed." - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
"Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact." - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
The US government wants people to be stupid so they can be manipulated more easily
Supply and demand, along with historic sexism.
So I think we have a history of low pay, the vast number militants against that changing, and to appearance anyone can be a “teacher”
Don’t get me wrong my family has significant history in the field and deep respect for the importance and to the huge impact a good teacher can make on someone’s future. But when my kid wanted to teach, after saying I would be so proud as would the vast array of ancestors, I added that you need to be aware of poor pay. To translate to video game, it’s doing life in hard mode
Forget what it says on the tin. To truly understand a society, look at its institutions.
Education isn't valued by the sociopaths that run the US.
Clarification: Education is so dangerous to the ruling class that they are attempting to remove it.
There are two parts. First, they aren't as underpaid as most people think in most cases. The union isn't dumb. When they negotiate they look at the long term. A career teacher (30 to 35 years) can retire at about 55 give or take depending on the district. And they will get something like 80% of thier salary for the rest of thier life. They will also get subsidized health insurance. And in some states, all of that is tax free. That is a ton of money and a ton of security. And for many, they can retire, collect pension, and go get another job at the same time if they want. I make more than double what teachers make best case, and my wife works too for a 6 figure salary. I can't possibly retire at 55, let alone feel secure doing so. I also have been laid off twice over the last 30 years, where as most teacher don't have to worry about that after 10 years. Now, I get to take vacation anytime of the year, I can change jobs or move and not mess up my future benefits. I don't have to deal with parents. Lots of intangible benefits to not being a teacher. But the point is the union ensures those less obvious benefits, which keeps the current salary low. This keeps the optics of drastically underpaid teachers so that the union can still negotiate for more with public sentiment on thier side. So while they are still underpaid, it isn't as drastic as it would appear.
The other reason is simple. There are a lot of teachers. Like a lot a lot. And schools are generally built to a higher standard of saftey, so they are much more expensive than other building types. All of this adds up to a very high cost. Education is typically one of the largest expenditures for a state budget. Poloticians could dump more money into it, but it isn't likely to be enough to make a difference that will get them reelected. So they put money other places that will get them votes.
That's your reasons why.
are they not underpaid everywhere else too? I don't think this is a USA only issue, all public teachers where I live with the exception of teachers for universities complain about low salary
No, in many Euro countires it's a good-paying middle-class job with reasonable hours. in rich places in the USA, it's also a good paying job, but the vast majority of the USA isn't wealthy, it's poor.
The underpaid people at uni are all the non-tenture track faculty. tenure track faculty are paid well, usually more than double non-tenure faculty.
In Germany it's just primary school teachers. For secondary school teachers, I think the wages are solid. The working conditions are still absolutely shit which is why I turned away from the profession (at least for now). But the wages are not the problem there.
There's a wild spread on both pay and the requirements to work as a teacher. Some places require barely more than a pulse. Some places require years of schooling. Some places pay teachers no better than shelf-stockers. Some pay a decent wage and/or have a decent pension/benefits system. It's definitely not a monoculture.
Knowing what you're talking about is considered elitist by most Americans. Under-funding education is effectively a DEI program for idiots.
School budgets are tied to property taxes for the district the schools serve.
Because (public) education isn't valued and we insist on the idiotic practice of funding schools primarily through local property taxes.
In the US, public schools are funded by the local tax base. If the local tax base is broke as fuck, their services will be broke as fuck. That means you've got crumbling sewer systems to worry about more than having well paid teachers.
Because if public education pumped out smart kids, no one would vote Republican.
Not just in the US.
All the other answers are correct.
Republicans / conservatives in the US are a poison. Delusional, evil. Either opportunist pieces of shit or certifiably the dumbest people in the world.
Their existence is a net negative, period, full stop. Their non-existence...well, take that as you will.
The want us just smart enough to do our taxes and not think too much about anything important.
To add to the (absolutely accurate) commentary in the rest of the thread, this hits on a something Grabber talks about in Bullshit Jobs. Almost universally, the jobs that are the most important to society actually functioning are the ones that pay the least (with the one notable exception of physicians). There's this idea that you should be "grateful" to have such an important job, and that's in a way almost part of your pay. See also nurses, elderly care providers, daycare employees, anyone who works for a charity. People in charge use this "moral capital" as a way to convince you to take less actual money
physicians in primary care are the lowest paid doctors. they might make 200K a year, often less, but that's peanuts compared to other specialties that are making 2-4x that. a dermatologist makes like 400K for popping pimples.
because education teaches kids how to think and to know right from wrong.
Which is why the cabal of fascist pedophiles have spent the past 50+ years trying to demonize and undermine it.
Not raising the education of the public is an easy control method and also easily keeps up the myth of the USA being such a great country while completely obviously contradicting itself.