<i>chuckle</i> one of those articles I would have whole-heartedly agreed with before I became a teacher :-)<p>Have you ever been, say, on a date, or visiting a relative, and they ask you what your job as a computer programmer is like? How could you possibly explain it to them? I've had jobs which were so technically complicated my boss didn't know what I was doing for a living.<p>When learning how to teach, you find out very quickly that no matter how intellectual your former job was, you don't know jack about teaching. Once, I watched my mentor teach a lesson, and afterwords every student in the class could easily do the homework. I taught the next class, and NONE of the students could do the homework ;-) They were kind in their feedback, but I had left them so confused that they didn't even know where to begin.<p>Teaching is a <i>craft</i>, which, like computer programming, takes years to learn, and a lifetime to hone to perfection.<p>If all you do is scroll through feeds, which have algorithms which carefully serve up to you articles like this one--articles which stroke your ego into thinking that you are one of the smart ones and the only reason you are not living your dream life is that you are mired down by stupid people and stupid institutions, well...you are not qualified to weigh in on whether we need teachers or not. Or anything else for that matter.<p>---//---<p>Let me point out another fallacy the author is making: he says that we should "listen to the market" because it is telling us that we need less teachers. But the "market" for teachers is nothing at all like the market for butter. Salaries are not set by supply and demand, they are set by politicians and policy makers, and how much the local citizenry is willing to pay in property taxes. Salaries for teachers bear absolutely no relationship to the amount of value they create. It is ludicrous to think that "the market" is telling us that we don't need teachers.