"It is when the gods hate a man with an unnatural abhorrence that they drive him to the profession of school master." -- Seneca
For any of you who are new to the "capitalism means the poor are lazy" game, the answer to the riddle is "teachers." For anyone frustrated by the casual deployment of the verbal stink bomb of "earn," the antidote is "teachers." Teachers are like the nineteenth century's English vicar (or vice versa, really, since we were there first): a stockpile of intelligent, tinkering, creative, hard working, poor but visible servants of the public good.
Society for the Abolition of All Personal Earnings (a necessary digression)
The word "earn" should come with a warning label, like "Speed limit 15 mph. Unstable on turns. Weight limit 1.5 kg."
Lexically, earn hasn't much to offer. Way back in Old English, "earnian" meant "deserve" first and then "labor for" second, according to Bosworth Toller. Contemporary professional dictionaries are descriptive rather than proscriptive, so the 4th edition American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language recognizes the mudpie of the word today and give it as 1. "To gain... for the performance of service, labor, or work 2. To aquire or deserve as a result of effort... 3. To yield as return or profit." The connotations have reversed, in other words.
When we hear "earn" used in politics it's coding "justice in exchange." If you say to a neighbor's kid, "If you weed my flower bed, you'll earn $15" then you're an innocent word user, but that's not politics. On the other hand, if you say, "Hey! Don't tax me: I earned my damn money," then that's political, and the word cracks its chassis under the strain. Why? Well, read on.
When you hear "earn," substitute "justified," and you will see what I mean. Here is a National Review deep thinker talking about minorities not "earning" their places in college by not having the right scores. You see? If "earn" is supposed to be deserving for work, labor, etc., then how does that relate to aptitude scores? Embedded in the use of the word is the faith that "scores" are not merely an honest yardstick, but THE honest yardstick and that colleges are for the naturally gifted.
"My money came to me by Just means, so you cannot tax me" doesn't have the zing of "I earned my money, and I don't want to give it to those people."
The implied justice of "earned" goes in reverse, too. Here is that deepest of deep wells of thought, National Review Online's "The Corner," cornerboy Jim Manzi this time, saying that he doesn't need to understand Paul Krugman's economics to agree with another writer that the super rich (10% of any and every company) won't work if they are taxed, because it's a basic truth that all work is hateful and no one does anything for anyone without pay, and Krugman's economics is "pseudo-scientific prediction."
It comes down to this "earn" idea. As long as Bob shouts, "I earned my money," he actually gets away with the fallacy known as begging the question because he gets to argue two propositions: virtue and justice. He says 1. it is my money, 2. my money is the product of virtue, 3. my virtue is shown by my money, 4. it cannot be taken from my without a argument on the same scale (me).
Those People!
When a naive conservative tells you, "Those people are poor because they don't have skills. People are paid what they're worth," then he (or she) is arguing that the economy of the United States is just.
That person is arguing that there is a Darwinian (we reward with capital those most adapted to the changing environment) or scientific (knowledge and technical proficiency, regardless of content, gain reward) or Utilitarian (those who perform the greatest good to the greatest number get the greatest pay) logic for compensation and that the pole star of this reason creates the rules -- you know, the rules that are blithely cited in the formula "work hard, play by the rules, and you'll get ahead?" -- and the rules create "earned" income and "undeserved" income -- a wedge by which Barbra Streisand can be bad and Chunk Norris good. Most especially, though, this undergirding principle of justice means that the income tax is not merely a progressive tax, but a progressive injustice. As it increases with wealth, it increases in wrongdoing, because increasing wealth is increasing "earned it" virtue.
I realize that it has fashionable since H. L. Mencken to lay some of this misery on the backs of the Puritans. They did have a belief in providence that made the lived life a consequential one, so that the righteous prospered due to blessings, and later the corollary was worked out by clever factory owners: those who failed to prosper must have no blessings. However, the prosperity gospel is an absurdity that no one age, sect, or religion can claim, because it abounded among the pagans and thrives everywhere. At its root is simply a superstitious desire to make the world make sense by asking the cosmos to conform to the rules of interpersonal relationships. (Basically, it's assuming or asking the national economy to behave the way that a trade between you and the neighbor kid would.)
IF the world worked the way that the small scale exchange works -- either Adam Smith's market cross economy or Bob's expectation of fair dealing -- then we would have clear heroes and villains. IF hard work meant success, or even survival, and if the desire to work meant work, then the universe's order would be not only assured, but at rest. Then again, if the desire for love meant love, why would I be single?
The attraction of the "earned" income is not merely virtue for the one with the cash, or even a nicely carved set of villains to scream at every April, but also a clean conscience. If the poor are poor because God damns them to it, or because they are lazy, or because they do not desire anything more, then all of this acts as glorious absolution. Like William Graham Sumner in 1883, it says that the rich are good natured, that the classes owe each other absolutely nothing but mild contempt. "Earning it" elevates the wealthy and casts away the poor, both.
The answer to this masturbatory fantasy is "teachers."
Teachers: the refutation
Education is one of those things that we all go through. I like to think most people are deeply affected by it (and perhaps so deeply affected that we know the difference between "effect" and "affect" and therefore avoid "impact" as a verb), but it's also like an immunization. We get childhood immunizations and then slowly forget about them. Oh, we demand that they be there for our children, but we cannot sympathize with the feeling of it and cannot quite remember the process.
State legislatures never quite remember their own educations, except for the Football Saturdays or some other corrosive frippery. They don't know about the perpetual crisis of scores and population pressure, and there is no way they (or anyone, frankly) can understand the reports written in Educationalese, so they are baffled by funding requests. The GOP had the stroke (of genius) to figure out that they could claim to be "for education" by being against educators, and so now there aren't even votes to gain in paying teachers.
What do teachers do all day? Legislators and a fair group of regular voters remember, as students, that teachers left at 3:00 PM (because they, as students, left), and they were always so nice. It's not like they had real jobs.
Truthfully, teachers refute every line of argument on "earning." On an Utilitarian basis, teachers do far more for the public good than lobbyists, and yet they are paid poorly. On a scientific basis, they are well educated and well trained in communication, and yet they make far less than public relations consultants. From the point of view of hours and difficulty, they average work more than 40 hours a week, usually do not get the summer vacation, and they do not get any overtime pay.
Who does more good for society, a mediocre high school science teacher, or Rihanna? Who is paid more? Who works harder, the less-than-minimum wage waitress or the stock jobber? Who works harder, the construction guy or the business guy on the phone (and which will give up his seat on the subway for a pregnant woman?... but that's a different rant)?
People do not "earn" money by deserving it. They "earn" it by being rare. Apparently many thousands demand a Rihanna, and yet there is only one. On the other hand, I think it's in the Bible that "the poor shall be with you always... and English teachers."
So, how come? Below, I hope to explain not merely that teachers get burned -- we should all know that -- but why teaching is a profession that is naturally tailored to abuse in a capitalistic system.
Why would the teaching profession be particularly likely to be exploited? Well, first consider the Marxisant "alienation of the worker from the product."
"Teachers don't do anything all day":
Illusions of a pre-capitalist profession in a capitalist society
Ideology is either the position of a class member in relation to others or the awareness of a person's class position's conflict with another or the perceived notion of one's class position compared to others, depending upon which Marxist or post-Hegelian theorist you cheer for in football, but it comes down to the fact that an ideology is created by workers recognizing that what they do is "alike" somehow and what the other folks do is "dislike" somehow. One reason a worker would even think about this is that the worker becomes conscious of the work rather than the service she or he provides.
A critical feature of late model capitalism is to not merely alienate the worker from the product, but to alienate the crud out of the worker. "What do you make" is impossible to answer for a manager or executive. Even a factory worker cannot answer it, because that person makes a part.
As an HR person what she makes. Ask her to explain "what you do all day" to a landscaper. A result of this alienation is that ideology forms. "Managers" talk to each other, because they can't talk to "labor," and "service workers" talk to each other, because "blue collar" can't understand what they're complaining about.
In a sense, teachers are the last people on earth with no alienation of work. We see the product of our labor directly. We work like the devil, and the result is that a standardized test designed by M.Ed's goes up. On the other hand, our work itself is exceptionally difficult to describe. Good teaching gets described quite often, but this is largely observation or introspection or freezing and analyzing something that is "natural." Teachers do not have the alienation from their product because their work is non-capitalist: it does not require the purchase of a means, does not require a centralized location, does not require ownership in any form or fashion. Indeed, it naturally resists licensure and regulation.
However, because it lacks that alienation, it also lacks a great deal of the ideology -- or rather it loses the benefits of the ideology. "Everyone can teach," the thinking goes, and "Those who can't do, teach." Teaching is presumed to be not pre-capitalist, but sub-capitalist.
Can you be a public relations expert? Can you be a manager? How about a "re-capitalization expert?" Well, can you be a teacher? (If you're honest, you pause and admit that, yes, you think you can.)
The general view is at least, "Well, I could be a teacher sooner than the others," but is that due to your virtue or because teaching doesn't have a palisade of jargon, charts, math, and certificates protecting it? Is it because you've seen teachers, and it looks pretty straightforward, whereas, because of ideology, you haven't a clue what an outsourcing expert does?
As jmuse observed at Politicsusa, during the Wisconsin attack on teachers the assumption was that teachers,
"are just overpaid babysitters who work half the time that private sector employees do and are draining valuable state and federal resources that could be better spent on oil subsidies and tax cuts for the rich. There have been letters to the editor and pundits claiming that teachers make over $200,000 per year and are drawing more than that in unpaid lifetime pensions."
Because there is no professional ideology surrounding teaching, whereby teachers secret themselves from the rest of society and scorn all other professions as inferior, and because teachers must interact with the public, the public's idea of teaching comes only from receiving the service. (Modesty forbids my drawing the analogy that it would be like a john assuming that prostitutes are all happy, amorous, orgasmic women who are deeply in love with him because they acted that way.)
Teaching's non-capital pay
I have slowly come to the conclusion that the teaching profession is not only a squabble waiting to happen, but that the persons who take it up have peculiarities that allow them to survive anaerobically, like extremophile bacteria.
"A complaining teacher is a happy teacher
I got this from a friend of mine. I laughed when I heard it, because there was some truth to it.
As educated individuals, and as knowledge workers, teachers are high in critical thinking (we hope) and equipped to discover information. Consequently, they will not only find out what other people make, but they can dream up a Utopia and measure the real against it. A retiring English Department head at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said that the experience had been, "Like getting pecked to death by a flock of ducks."
"My class!"
Teachers also tend to be anti-authoritarian to a greater degree than other folks. I do not have any studies to back me up on this, only observation, but my life as a teacher points to the observation that, the higher the level, the more likely the teacher is to be extremely bitter about authority. This is sometimes mistaken for "liberalism." It isn't.
Intellectuals, Umberto Eco said in Four Moral Pieces (on the Press), must be quarrelsome company. They are companions whose job is to find fault. Irritable and uneasy, in the process of daily business, this makes them competitive, cliquish, and vicious when given an order (most notable in faculty meetings and those brawls sometimes called NEA union meetings).
Teachers get to avoid what the rest of the world dreams of: the boss. Teachers get orders, have all sorts of arbitrary and idiotic things they have to do, but they do their jobs without someone constantly demanding compliments and obedience. This is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Teacher Pay
Some teachers love their students and nurture them. Some teachers love their students like friends and companions. Some teachers love their subjects as if an illicit sex partner and only care for its well being. Some teachers love the well-ordered republic and, having failed to find one outside the walls, attempt to carve one out of the linoleum and flesh of the classroom.
None of these types is a bad teacher, by the way. None of these is a bad motivation. It always depends on what the person does with it.
However, for the teacher whose third graders feel like her own children, she is paid beyond cash with every year. For the teacher whose students laugh at her jokes and share her enthusiasms, the experience of the classroom is heady in a way that few things are. For the professing expert devoted to pure Chemistry, seeing another's interest spark to flame is a high joy, and for the authoritarian every semester brings on the superhuman miracle of order.
Teachers do not teach solely for money. It is an anti-capitalist profession because it mixes in basic psychology, human need and evolutionary function, and social cohesion.
The punchline: teachers are natural targets
In 1992, Jim Gardner ran for governor of North Carolina promising to "make teachers work an honest day." That's right -- long before FitzWalkerstan there was Mr. Hardee's saying that we needed to get rid of computers and all that stuff, because we keep giving them schools money and computers, and the test scores don't get no better, so he says let's cut some money and stuff and see if we can't make them do some work! (Oh, but he was a victim, you see. The newspapers were mean to him.)
I was in North Carolina at the time, and I was shocked. I was more shocked that he wasn't held up to public ridicule and ridden out of the state on a rail. I have, you see, had some time to think about this charge. Gardner said that education needed to be the way it was when he was a kid. Back then, there weren't computers, and he done turned out fine.
What a teacher does all day is obscure. Teachers have no way to codify or quantify what they do all day. Neither do most people, and, if we ask them to, then they will become instantly inefficient at their jobs, as now their job will be discussing their job. No number of people who either have been teachers or been something else and then taught testifying can make a dent in this mystery, either. My own family and friends trust me that I'm very tired and that I work very hard, but they don't know what I do. If I tell them that my contract of 4/4 went to 5/6 with an increase of cap from 20 - 25, it means nothing to them. If I say, "I got 100% composition and 120 students in a semester, when I signed up for no more than 165 a year," it means nothing.
Further, because the economy works by supply and demand, there will be teachers so long as people will accept survival plus joy of human desires and social cohesion.
I wish I had a remedy, other than common sense, empathy, and education, but I don't. The capitalist system will always find the pre-capitalist professions the easiest to exploit, and this is why the trades, artisans, and teachers are always the enemy. Obviously, I don't think that teachers are born suckers, but I think we are natural targets. We need to know this, know why, and tailor our responses to the public assault to its real origins.