Money cannot buy you happiness. But a career in teaching can.

I critique education.
A lot.
I often blog, even scathingly and sarcastically, about teachers, especially in higher education.

But, through all that, I am sure readers--yes, I am referring to you--did not go away with a feeling that I hate education and teachers.  I am pretty confident that I managed to get across that there is nothing else but teaching that I would do, and that there is no other activity but the education part that I want to be involved with.

So why critique then?

Simple. I cherish teaching and education that much.
I want things to be even better than they are now, and every criticism is nothing but yet another pointer to how we could improve on the current conditions.

I used to say that teaching is a calling.  But then a few years ago when an uber-religious faculty colleague said that, I realized how much misleading it could be to refer to what I do as a "calling."  I suppose that by using the word "calling" I wanted to convey an idea that, at a fundamental level, while teaching is a profession, most of us are drawn to it not because of the economic incentives.  As I noted before, "the salary is almost a bonus, which I cannot live without."  It was a pleasure, thus, to read the following sentences in an otherwise controversial piece:

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees. Students are even weirder economic animals: Most of them would rather do something else with their time than sit in a room and learn algebra, even though the investment is well documented to pay off.

Those who want to earn truckloads of money know that the economic rewards are immensely greater when schooling for a Wall Street job, or a healthcare job, or a ... well, there are plenty of those types.

Society knows that too.  Which is why we in the teaching profession are respected way more than most of those in high income earning professions can even dream of.

From 1977 to 2009, the percent who thought teaching was a profession with “very great prestige” has gone from 29% to 51%. The graph below shows this percentages for teachers, and for comparison, athletes, bankers, and priests.

As you can see teachers have done relatively well. In fact, no other occupation in the survey has seen such an improvement in their public perception over this time-period. The next closest are engineer and business executive, which only have 36% and 23% reporting “very great prestige”, respectively, and have both only gone up 5% over time.
In addition to have prestige in the public’s eye, the evidence shows that teachers have an even higher public perception of their trustworthiness. As of 2013, a Gallup poll found “grade school teachers” were ranked third in terms of the percent of respondents who rated their honesty and ethical standards very high or high.  An impressive 70% of respondents rated teachers very high on this measure, which placed them under only nurses and pharmacists. Similarly, as of 2011, this Gallup poll showed “high school teachers” had 62% by the same measure. In contrast, clergy had 47%, police officers 54%, and the lowly journalist had 24%.

Many of my colleagues--I mean in the large context and not merely those who work at the same place I do--however overlook this exclusive club in which we belong.  To my horror, they complain forever that they are underpaid.  Of course it might seem like it is slave labor.  That has almost always been the case throughout history in most cultures.  But, it is also equally a consistent theme throughout history that teachers have been respected and revered.

Those responding to the "calling"--the clergy--are our real competitors for the respect ;)  In the pursuit of money and power, do we really want to compete, and slide down, to the ranks of athletes or Wall Street bankers?  Or, gasp, Congress?

The whiner teachers aside, at the end of day, most in the teaching profession are happy with their careers and lives:

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Princeton economist Angus Deaton have found that happiness does not increase with annual income after reaching the $75,000 mark. Unfortunately, most young people today don’t seem to understand this. When asked why they want to go to college, an all-time high of nearly 75% of incoming freshmen in 2012 said “to be able to make more money,” according to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.
A career in teaching may not rank high in the minds of most college students, especially those seeking big salaries. But all that may soon change if young people realize the real secret to a good life.
Teachers beat out investment bankers, consultants, accountants, engineers, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs on how they rate their lives overall.

So, a brief pause before I return to criticizing higher education and unprofessional colleagues ;)

America’s not getting any respect

Published in The Register-Guard, June 2, 2008

It used to be the conventional wisdom that Americans learn world geography only when the country is at war. But apparently even being at war does not catalyze the need to understand the world and, more importantly, our own place in it.

Recently, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited India on a quick trip that also included stops in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. India has a growing need for energy and, with very little petroleum and natural gas within its borders, it actively seeks to import them from other countries — including Iran.

The U.S. government, which is on a mission to isolate Iran as much as possible, attempted to pressure India on the eve of this visit. Our government views any trade with Iran as supporting the regime there and, thus, opposed a natural gas pipeline linking Iran and India. The State Department further advised India to press Ahmadinejad to end Iran’s nuclear program.

To which the Indian government’s spokesman responded: “India and Iran are ancient civilizations whose relations span centuries. Neither country needs any guidance on the future conduct of bilateral relations.”

That is a quite a rebuke to the world’s lone superpower, which is often quite alone, too, in many ways. But it was not the first time and is increasingly becoming the trend. It is more and more difficult to get other countries to “our” side, while it is getting easier for countries to pooh-pooh the United States.

In a stinging essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, writes: “The West is understandably reluctant to accept that the era of its domination is ending and that the Asian century has come.”

Ouch! Even though Mahbubani refers to the West, most of the essay targets only the United States.

Mahbubani then kicks it up a notch when he writes: “The West is not welcoming Asia’s progress. ... Unfortunately, the West has gone from being the world’s primary problem solver to being its single biggest liability.” Bam!

Even Rodney Dangerfield gets more respect than the United States, when our status is such that we are being explicitly blamed as being the world’s single biggest liability!

Despite all this, I am not sure whether we in the United States are truly making any attempt to understand the world that is changing at a rapid clip. Even when we pause to note an event, we seem to be constrained by calculations, explicit or implicit, of “what’s in it for us?”

Remember the brouhaha when it seemed as if every presidential candidate, when there were many, was issuing calls for Pervez Musharraf to quit the Pakistani presidency? I suppose it was politically convenient then, and once that yielded the desired benefits, we were off to other pressing matters.

Well, Musharraf continues on as the president. Of course, the parties that opposed him have formed the government. But, ironically, it is this “opposition” to Musharraf that is seriously exploring releasing nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan from house arrest. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has publicly admitted to selling atomic secrets to such countries as Iran and North Korea. The same Iran that we want to excommunicate from the world. And the same North Korea that has become a master at negotiating on its own terms.

And, unfortunately, all America can do is watch events unfold.

Even more recently, just a couple of days ago, when the United States declassified intelligence information about Syria’s nuclear program, the collective response from most of the world was à la Rhett Butler’s, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” More ouch!

As we scramble to understand one global issue after another, we notice that the United States has not been able to play a constructive role in any of the recent crises — from Zimbabwe to Kenya, from Myanmar to Tibet.

At this rate, a Miss America contestant’s wishes for world peace might be the only way that the United States can fit in with the rest of the world!