Teachers should never have been disciplinarians. Their role is to teach kids. If kids are a behavior problem, the teacher should be allowed to expel/ban them from the classroom. This is the only thing that school administration needs to back teachers on. Education being compulsory for students who don’t want it is an extreme social mistake and one we should remedy as soon as possible. These disruptive students do far more damage to other good students than the benefit they provide if you “try hard” to make them work anyway. Not worth it.
The status quo in America gives teachers far too much power to decide the lifetime earning potential and fate of young students. Teachers are extremely tyrannical and that fact is never brought up at all in education discourse. (not even by the “anti teacher” right wingers)
But classroom management / "discipline" is still a thing. Getting a group of 18 nine-year-olds to quiet down at the right time takes a certain degree of skill, and that will always be a part of teaching, at least for this age group.
This is foolish. Contrary to the current insistence, children do not know what they want. They do not understand what they need. They are not small adults, they are children and children don't think ten minutes ahead let alone decades. Adults with the best interest of children (ideally their parents) are the ones responsible for thinking of their futures and making them do stuff today so they can have a good tomorrow.
I have to say that given what adults are currently doing to the planet, I'm not convinced that they're capable of planning decades ahead or thinking of the best interests of their children either.
Like, I'm not thrilled to be the perpetual doomsayer of HN, but reading someone talking about decades into the future in the context of children really bums me out these days. As a child I really thought the adults would sort things out, but increasingly it just looks like doom, and that's hard to accept.
I disagree. Children often don't see the value of education - partially because it's not shown to them.
A good example of this is journalism, which used to require little to no certification, but which today can require masters degrees for some positions.
In the end, the people that know and learn will have longer more productive careers, but there are enough sinecures in Korean (and US) society that the value of certification is overweighted.