The classroom is not your normal business

COLUMNIST Peter Lyons, a teacher of economics, really gives this reader a pain.

I cringed on reading his column back in April last year when he proposed young school teachers as indentured labour.

Now he is proposing (ODT, 31.8.18) aboveaverage teachers should be financially rewarded in a manner that would keep them in the classroom. He fails to say how that is to be accurately measured. Remember, children are not graded because they are clever; they are clever because they are graded.

In the real world, what business has its clientscustomersconsumers delivered to its place of retail or production by law?

The compulsory education law is operative till the captive, consuming students are 16 years old. Will it soon be 18, given the scientific notion that human brains don’t mature till 25 years?

Besides, nonconforming students can be excluded from the classroom; really obnoxious ones expelled from the school. In the real world, imagine a business telling a difficult customer to ‘‘sod off’’.

‘‘A significant pay increment for ‘expert teachers’ could be a solution,’’ Lyons says.

Kenneth Galbraith had the subject well summed up: ‘‘It is not in knowing, but in not knowing, that they do not know,’’ he said. Jim Moffat

Caversham