Teaching adults who pay for the privilege of being in your class is VERY VERY different from teaching children who are forced to be in your class.

The latter requires a very special skill set that can only be described as 'managing psychopaths'.

The former just requires you to show up and tell them they're on "responsible for the material" (i.e. they're on their own).

And without exception, every teacher I've ever spoken with (including several in my family) has told me that this skill is something you have to learn on the job. All of them, regardless of what route they took to become a teacher, were unprepared for managing classroom discipline.

And it took all of them a year or two to learn how to manage classrooms (some teachers never learn this skill).

I strongly agree that the licensing is just a way to limit supply. I'm not against unions per se, but in this matter, the teacher's union is a serious impediment to educational achievement in this country. It should be much easier to hire and fire teachers in this country. And teachers should be much better paid.

I'm going to argue against that idea.

1. The bar to become a teacher is quite low.

2. Most of the teachers I've met certainly didn't not have the necessary skills, but they, and the students endured.

Being an outstanding teacher required a very special skill set.

There are transferrable skills, but they're transferrable in the way that making buildings out of LEGO is transferrable to building actual buildings. There are large differences and a whole host of other challenges.

[I'm not a teacher, but I have a few friends that are teachers or training to be teachers.]

Sorry for going off-topic but I come from a small school and I don't understand how it is acceptable for class size to be huge (40+ students in a class is considered acceptable). I mean I get it if the class is led by someone extraordinary like Richard Feynman and everyone wants to be in his lectures but as others have said most teachers are not celebrities.

Plus, I don't think just because someone went through the motions of getting a license thirty years ago and all the certification conferences means that they are decent teachers today.

So basically we have no friends. The unions are not our friends obviously but the people who want to break teacher unions are also not our friends because they want to profit at our expense.

The problem is that education reform is an common empty promise in politics. Education is underfunded in most countries, and better funding (and then more education for teachers) would be very helpful.

Babysitters don't have to get the kids to DO anything.

Saying these are the same is like saying a manager in a business is only supposed to check if employees showed up and clocked in.

Sure, some managers are that bad at their job, but it is also very clear that their job is supposed to be much more than that.

Same with teachers. Getting 30 children who did not choose to be there to actually DO something is a very different skillset than babysitting.

/rant

Otherwise, there are two basic possibilities depending on the kid's parents. Either the kid is expected to try and DO something (and does), or the parent only expects child care. In the latter case, avoiding willful destruction and interruption is all that is required … tada, babysitting!

The manager analogy doesn't make sense because managers are much more directly accountable for whether the employees achieve anything for the company while clocking in. If managers' mostly subjective assessments were the only tangible output of employee time and other impacts were felt years later and weren't directly ascribable to an individual manager, then maybe the analogy would work.