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Teaching is one of the single most important professions in the world. We expect our teachers to be the best in the world. And yet? Our teacher salaries are criminally low. I tell you, when I think of a teacher struggling to feed her family while some sword swallower pulls down tens of millions of dollars a year just for putting swords down his throat, it just makes me sick.
What does it say about our society? Teachers are literally forced to pay for classroom supplies out of their own pocket, while a bunch of musclebound, slick-throated jocks take in multimillion-dollar endorsement deals every day. If Americans cared half as much about their children as about John Tugwell’s seconds per swallow or Theodora Nightingale’s slash-to-drool ratio, maybe our education system wouldn’t be in the sorry state that it’s in.
When kids talk about what they want to be when they grow up, do they say, “I want to educate the next generation?” No! They say, “I want to be able to hyperextend my neck and relax my esophageal sphincter so that millions of drunk idiots will cheer me on as I shove knives down my throat.” After all, why bother passing along the precious gift of knowledge when you can have buckets of money thrown at you for permanently distending your esophagus? This society is diseased.
I ask you this: Whom should we value more? The man who teaches a child to read about a sword or the man who shoves it in his mouth? It’s not even a question. The question is ridiculous.
And it’s not just the sword swallowers. Student teachers don’t have health insurance while knife jugglers are buying mansions. Class sizes are ballooning while lion tamers build their houses out of solid gold. The average fire eater makes in a day what 352 teachers make in an entire year. The average starting salary for an American teacher is $35,672. For identical twin unicyclists? $2 billion.
So the next time your property taxes come up for a vote, think about the society you want to live in. Is it a society where we use our throats to explain math problems to children, or a society where our throats are but a temporary receptacle for swords? I know which choice I’d make, America. Now it’s up to you.
