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I can think of a few explanations for this, but one of the big ones is that the licensing requirements for teachers are often designed (deliberately or not...) as a barrier to late entry to the profession as you describe.

There’s been some movement here in the last few years in some places, for example up until very recently if you were a college professor interested in moving to the high school level somewhere like New York - sorry, no, you’re not qualified because you don’t have a degree in education.

There are positive spins for the types of credentialling that have evolved around the professions but I’d argue none of them are in the interest of students.

Source: teacher and administrator in various countries

> " also got the impression that teachers tend to live in their own little world and tend to have very little experience outside of the educational system"

How on earth did you come to that conclusion?! Maybe your experiences have shifted it that way, but my teachers, my friends that are teachers, and my kids teachers certainly do not give that impression at all.

> "Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching? Why would it be a good idea to have a teacher straight of college teaching kids just a couple of years younger?"

Because they know the subject matter? I'm not really sure what you are getting at, so jobs should only be for those that know how to do something already - or only if you need to teach it?

Not sure there are jobs that would help a primary school teacher - they cover all the subjects - so multiple jobs over 20 years to satisfy that? How about a history teacher - should they be an archaeologist first? Or a Biology teacher, probably get that stem cell research in before teaching about the plant reproductive lifecycle.

It's seems to be hard enough to attract people that actually want to be paid peanuts to teach the next generation how to do things.

> ended up in the job as a fallback plan or a day job to get by. There was the occasional passionate teacher

Maybe you only remember middle and high school. This is categorically untrue for early childhood education, which is by far the most critical.

> Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching?

Because the pay is dismal, which is the last thing you want right before retirement.

Presumably GP's plan would be most useful for high-school students. Exposure to teachers who'd had varied & interesting careers outside the school system could be great for those within sight of leaving it.

Maybe part-time reduces the pay problem too. Think senior engineers with consulting gigs, who'd like to dial it down to 3 days a week, and do something productive with the rest.

Teachers make <25/hour with poor benefits (Florida, USA). A part-time senior engineer could pay for two full-time teachers...

Edit: and schools don't even have money for paper/supplies.

"Teachers make <25/hour with poor benefits (Florida, USA)."

Teacher pay varies greatly from area to area. Where I live in VA pay starts at $36/hour and goes up to $67 per hour. They also receive what would be considered by most to be excellent benefits. Over recent years my locality has been substancially increasing teacher pay each year especially on the upper end of the scale because the high end is actually behind nearby counties which we compete against for experienced teachers.

In Florida, a significant %, I'd estimate at least 10% of FL teachers, have come here from the North East to find a teaching job, because the job market is so competitive.

My early education was in the NE, and I had many distinguished teachers, and many were even from the south. Very few young teacher.

In FL, many young new teachers. Many from PA, NJ, and other competitive markets.

> pay varies greatly from area to area

In the SF Bay area, average SE comp is upwards of 200K, representing a small percent of the full market for software engineers...

I don't think the claim is that this is an untapped source of cheap labor. More that it's a (potential) source of inspiration, direction, contacts, knowledge. High school students have spent their entire lives inside the education system, taught by people who have also spent their entire lives inside the education system. They might benefit from perspectives on what's possible outside the wall, besides those they get from their parents.

> besides those they get from their parents

Most students don't have well-educated parents, so I agree the exposure is important.

My point is that, if this is ever going to happen, there needs to be more money directed at education.

On a related note, I went to high school in a town where there were essentially zero white-collar professional jobs. Parents were working either on the manufacturing line, in a call center, at the Walmart, steak-n-shake or gas station. The nearest cities, Jacksonville and Orlando were both at least 90 minutes away.

Where do we find the retiring-professionals for these students?

It's clearly no a silver bullet.

There may be opportunities for more blue-collar variants. I'm trying to think where but there was some program to hire former soldiers as teachers, which is a bit like that.

If we 3X the minimum teacher pay, we'd attract a whole new class of highly effective teachers.

That would solve the aforementioned issue, because people will move to BFE for the money.

Specialized and advanced subjects can be taught easier and cheaper. Their students are capable of learning virtually, giving them access to the best teachers in a subject area, and at as fast a speed as they can go.

What Public schools need to focus on are the lowest common denominators, your arithmetic to liberal arts, so that students are prepared for a more-self-guided education in specialized/advanced subjects. I'd argue people with experience in industry wouldn't even be valuable at this level, as their experience no longer generally prepares the students for further education.

> some program to hire former soldiers as teachers

That would be the Prussians, the origin of the compulsory universal education system with obedience and conformity as its foundation. The indoctrination worked very well, no wonder the system consequently spread all over the world.

I brought this up to a teacher, and she immediately said "how would the non-teacher keep the kids engaged? The class would be so boring because the people would think they can just go lecture for an hour."

Children don't sit through lectures, and even in high-schools the students are still children.

If you have a lifetime's savings, the pay isn't what keeps you from teaching at the end of your career. More likely its all the babysitting responsibilities that keep them away.

> babysitting responsibilities

So you want an industry expert to go teach second grade?

I imagine that any successful person would want to be able to demonstrate there success, thus placing them in teaching positions well past "babysitting" age.

I presume GP meant that keeping an unruly high-school class on track is... a skill you won't develop in most workplaces. Not literal "babysitting", but a large part of what teachers do, orthogonal to actually conveying content.

Then why send these people to high-schools either? Bring them in at the college level, and get more people into college.

If you had your shit together in highschool, then great, that's why you went to Harvard/stanford etc.

But most people don't. So save the extra beneficial instruction for when they are mature enough to benefit from it.

And if you want that extra help sooner, then you sound capable enough to find it on your own.

Because it's a mixture. Some rowdy kids are just bored sick, and can't see any point in memorising crap for another stupid exam. These same people might really benefit (let's say, HN) finding out there is more to coding than their teacher knows about, and that you can get paid to do it. Finding out that school-teachers aren't the only adult role models.

But the guy who might show them that might, this semi-retired engineer, may not have the skills or the desire to do crowd control, well enough and long enough to get through.

> desire to do crowd control

I wonder what % of people don't go back to teach because of that.

I bet it's a small number. In reality, the reasons are probably even more selfish.

If "crowd control" is such a problem, I'd like to know what the people that cite that reason are doing to produce video-courses that could provide much of the same value.

Anecdotally, all my over-educated friends who tried to take up teaching (after something else) gave up. Citing this reason, and sometimes the level of bureaucracy.

> over-educated

That part makes me think of "those who fail, teach." Which could be a confounding factor in your anecdotal assumption that they failed at teaching because of the X, and not b/c they're failures...

And in an affluent area, school behaviors are barely an issue. Teachers that fail here, think schools with a PTA, these people will fail anywhere. Impoverished schools are another story, as in multiple kids acting out from abuses at home, on a daily basis. Having to recognize and help kids who aren't even getting their basic needs met. Only real badass teachers last in the impoverished schools, and they are the ones that make a real difference, literally heroes without capes.

What people here on HN are calling babysitting is more like the one opportunity a child gets to scream for help from often horrific abuses at home.

Might that affect your perfect gifted child's one-on-one time with a public school teacher? Give me a break.

Failure is a pretty strong word, they all went on to do other things, better paid, they had options. They tried to teach, for a while, because they wanted to.

My point is just that they all underestimated how difficult controlling a pack of teenagers was going to be, even those who were at nice schools "with a PTA". That's what I think was meant by "babysitting" above (not my choice of word), it's a real hurdle. As you seem to agree.

I'm dubious that the world is short of video courses. But many people do miss out on human interactions which could show them other paths.

> they imagined more focus on the subject matter

Ie, "listen to me, the distinguished lecturer."

Non-educators, those not explicitly trained in how to educate, don't understand there is more to teaching than lecturing.

In a non-adult setting, good luck trying to get away with any lecturing at all.

Plenty of adults can't even converse without looking at their phone, so I doubt lecture-style works for them either.

If a "grizzled engineer" wants to make an impact in education, the best way is to teach a building block skill thoroughly and effectively, and on a platform that's free and easy to access. Leave the public school teachers to do they're jobs, they're actually way more competent than they get credit or compensated for.

> Because the pay is dismal, which is the last thing you want right before retirement.

Doesn't the money you invest right before retirement make the least amount of difference? You want to front load your high earning activities.

The pay is dismal, but that's exactly why people who no longer need the money (retired from industry) can afford to try teaching for a few years before moving onto a startup or opening up a pub. That's what some of my high school teachers did and that's what I plan to do.

> front load your high earning activities

That's a nice thought, but I'm sure this idea would be lost on 90% of the US population.

But if you think the remaining 10% "going back to be teachers" is going to save education, well, God help us.

HN is full of people that graduated from college into jobs on $200k a year plus, putting at least $averagesalary into index linked 401ks, having benefited from the mass transfer of growth from workers to owners over the last decade or so, and are in a position to retire in their mid-to-late 30s.

That's not normal.

> On the other hand I have met quite some folk in the pre-retirement age ~50-65 that are in technical jobs and had 30 years of experience in explaining and understanding things and are passionate about teaching what they've learnt.

Because teaching to everyone and not just the motivated is really freakin' hard. And it takes an amount of energy that most 55+ year olds do not possess.

My father taught high school for 35+ years. The biggest problem was not knowing the material--it was motivating students to want to know the material.

And that is a very rare skill.

And he retired because eventually that skill took too much energy for him to muster up at his age.