A Useful Idea: Pay Teachers

I saw this today online at The New York Times, and you know, it needs to be said loudly and often: part of any stimulus to the economy has to target education. And it seems to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea to give anyone teaching a break. At the end of the day, teaching at any level is a less and less desirable occupation. If the idea is to get the best and brightest to want to help shape the next best and brightest, finding ways to help make teaching desirable rather than simply profitable seems in order.

There's a lesson in this, incidentally: what's cheapest and most convenient (what a market view pushes) is not always the best in the long run. This is certainly the case in education.

And let me make the point, briefly, that innovation isn't just due to math and science. If the recent problems in banking tell us anything, it's that there's a substantial need for some of those fluffy liberal arts ideas out there: things like ethics and history and economics seem like they'd go a long way to helping shape the future.