Apart from governemnt lawyers and academics everybody is in private practice or working for a company. Their employers/clients have them to deal with money problems. Whoever is close to the money gets to keep some. Also, teachers have tenure, great pensions, work only 9-10 months a year, and within a few years of being hired, work under 40 hours a week on average.
>Only your ingrained cultural expectations suggest this. Can you strip those out and suggest any objective reasons that lawyers are worth more?
If you mean morally, no, it's a value discussion, and those are always boring because nobody ever convinces anybody. If you're talking about how much their labour is worth... A good lawyer makes their client money or stops bad things happening to them. This is a much more valuable service than childcare/socialisation/education to the people handing out the money. Children have no money or freedom after all.
>Do they train for longer?
Not relevant
>Is their work more important?
Value judgement; all heat, no light
>Do they need better school grades?
Yes, but that's also not terribly relevant.
No teacher I've met works under 40 hours a week. My parents are both teachers, as well as at least one friend. They may be "on the clock" for less than 40 hours a week, but consistently have to work up to 60 hours a week to satisfy all of their responsibilities (including meeting with students and parents, grading assignments, attending meetings, etc).
As a thought exam think about what are they doing off the clock? Most likely grading or setting exams. The best and youngest work over their pre-packaged lesson plans and augment them to the best of their ability. However these are the best, the top few percent. The scan-tron crew do none of this.
*stolen directly from yummyfajitas
It was for me. I was an awful student all the way through high school (graduated with something around a D average). I blossomed in college with a near-perfect GPA in a natural science major. (What I had to go through to get into the university I did is another story, and beside the point.) The important difference between these two environments is that I wasn't a prisoner at the university.
I have never accepted authority that I thought was unjust ("Who are you to tell me that you know what's better for me than I do?"), and that's exactly how I viewed my education before college. Granted, there are sensible limitations (mostly related to safety) on how far children can be left to their own devices, but all I ever wanted as a child was to spring from my daily prison and do something that I knew was worthwhile.