Labor has been commodified in the American culture.
I would guess that the average working person makes about $30 an hour. That would be $1200 per week and about $60,000 per year.
The average big corporate CEO makes about 500 times the average worker thus they make about $15,000 per hour.
How do we determine how much we value the time of a child? I guess we might say that a K-12 teacher makes average wages and has about 30 children in their classroom thus we value a child’s time at about $1 per hour.
Do we evaluate a child’s time too highly or too lowly? I think that we place too little value on a child’s time.
The lower we place the value of a child’s time the more likely will a parent or teacher spend less time with that child. The lower value we place on a child’s time the more willing we are to allow that child to “waste time”.
Adolescence appears to be something that has developed late in our culture. A hundred years ago a child became an adult at 16 and today that age often extends to the early to mid 20s.
I understand your basic premise, and would agree that both teachers and children are undervalued in our society, but I have a question about the way you’re defining value. Assuming we’re saying value, in this context, is monetary, why do you reason that our value of the child’s time is the percentage of the teacher’s salary divided by the number of children present in the classroom? What about when parents are paying tuition for their children’s schools? What about the amount we pay children, i.e. allowance or money from babysitting, to do chores? I’d like to see you explain your basic premise of a child’s value (teacher’s value/number of children) more thoroughly.
I have tried to quantify the unquantifiable. I am trying to judge a quality with quantity. This is just trying to focus attention on some important considerations that we seldom examine. People take notice when we talk about dollar evaluation because it is easily understood.
I suspect that home schoolers place greater value on their children’s time than do the rest of us. Of course, much of the reason for home schooling is religious. It is obvious that Americans give little thought to the importance of education considering how wealth our nation is and how poor our educational system.
For such a wealthy nation America has a very poor educational system. I hope that Obama will change all that. What is required is to awaken the citizens to the dire situation that we are in.
Ok, I understand where you’re coming from a little better now.
The problem, then, seems to be less the value placed on a child’s time, which admittedly is very little, but the value placed on education. America talks about education like it cares a lot, but doesn’t invest money accordingly. Education tends to be taken for granted. Children, also, tend to be taken for granted. I don’t know where one would even begin to change that, though. As you said, hopefully Obama will do something. Bush’s solution seems to have made the problem worse.
I heard a disturbing theory yesterday. Some believe that part of why college is so expensive is because the government and other such entities realized that educated people, especially college students, cause a lot of trouble. They disturb the status quo. They protest, and ask for more civil rights. This sounds like another conspiracy theory, but it’s frightening to consider.
If we were to recognize that the time of our children is important we would improve our educational system, we would recognize the wasted time, we would recognize better how much they need to learn, we would recognize how little we learned, we would…
College, like the rest of our educational system, does not help youngsters to become independent Critical Thinkers and thus the type of people that instigate change. Our educational system, K through PhD, is designed to make us good consumers and producers who will not upset the apple cart for those doing very well with a bovine like population.
I’ve had a lot of teachers which contradicted this rule, but the system itself is definitely made that way. Then again, I’m at a college with classes like “Alternatives to Consumerism”, so perhaps I’m living in the rare exception.
Most of the current school system was built around the factory system, also. It was made to keep the kids out of parents’ hair while the parents were working ridiculous hours, and ultimately pushed the children towards factory work or something similar–kids get awfully used to busy work. We may need to restructure the entire system. That, again, requires people to actually care.
Well, putting aside the fact that value is inherently relative (even in monetary terms, just look at the prices of big-macs across different cities), I would think education is an industry that provides too little immediate incentives. Overshadowed by more visible crises, it became a feel-good luxury.
I believe university education was once used as a means of class propagation–a means to strengthen class boundaries. Just look at Oxbridge. On the other hand, vocational schools were set up as the skills required for modern industries became more and more advanced, and a certain standardization and knowledge base became required.
There’s allot to consider here. Unfortuately as I am from england Im not so good at $ but I’m sure we will manage.
I want to make a couple of points
I think it is a good thing that people stay children longer, in my opinion childhood is easier and more fun, (and I had quite a lot of trauma in my childhood as well) I think that making our children more productive is actually a bad thing. I think that with today’s societal pressures, they have enough to deal with. Perhaps we need more teaching on how to deal with adult life as I think it the transition that many young people deal with (i did).
Amount spent on children can differ greatly. I work in a school for children with behavioral problems, we are at the higher end of money per child per year and it works out something like this:
Ratio of 6-1 adults to children this includes psychologists care workers etc. 24 hour supervision.
Cost £120,000 per year. But I agree that basic school funding is rubbish
If teachers were paid standard babysitting rates per child, they would typically be making significantly more than they are. But as a child’s time is invaluable, we not only took the pay cut, but we brought added value to the broader equation.
When you put it that way, it sounds like some twelve- and thirteen-year-olds are making more (at least per child per hour) than their certified counterparts, but may have a similar amount of impact on a child’s development in some cases.