Teaching is often called an honorable profession, and as a youth I experienced that although my parents had a large family on a schoolteacher's salary, the fact that my father was a college professor put him in the same class as the doctors, lawyers, judges and architects who lived in the same neighborhood. It was an honorable profession.
Today teachers are rather disrespected, and it has occurred to me the reason is that they are paid by the state. In the west education (ex ducere, to lead out of, presumably darkness into the light) made its great achievements in an educational system quite different than what we have today. From Augustine to Aquinas, teachers were paid directly by the students. Great innovators could arise and challenge and move our culture forward. Both saints were profoundly controversial in their times, but both prevailed given the educational system we had in place at the time.
Just a few centuries after Aquinas, when teachers such as Galileo were either church or state sponsored, we have rather petty arguments bogging down the system. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and in the modern state, where so few people can take over the whole system, the market is cut out of the equation. Look at medicine, law and education, all generally state sponsored, and all subject to such disrespect. The program for restoring honor to these professions is to withdraw state support.
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