Why would we pay the people who spend arguably the most time imprinting good values on our children? Why, that sounds like SOCIALISM!!! /s
I had good teachers and shitty teachers. Twenty years later, I got in touch with my junior high school to find out if a teacher was still there (she was). The office agreed to forward an email to her if I sent it to the school’s public address. I wrote her pretty much a love letter (not really) about how much she influenced me by taking an interest in my creative writing and how much it meant to me that she really cared. I never heard back about it. Maybe she didn’t remember me (it’d been a long time). But it was important to me that she know so I told her.
It’s a sign of our collective depravity that we don’t respect educators more.