[InterfaceLeader]

Originally Posted by Bruce Achterberg

Sorry to break your paradigm, but my parents--mostly my mother--taught me how to read.

How nice for you. Not everyone has parents, not everyone has literate parents, not everyone has loving parents, so just go back to your middle class world, okay? Just because you don't need something, doesn't make it worthless. [/quote]

Teachers taught me pretty much squat. In fact, I kind of feel I would have been better off without teachers and school since I would have had the freedom to naturally play to my strengths as I tend to do when I'm left alone to my own devices.

So what? Again, you are ONE person. Go to a ghetto school, and ask someone whose been saved from a life of gangs and crime, thanks to a truly passionate and dedicated teacher. The sheer fact any of those kids had a chance is amazing, that teachers are prepared to take on those kinds of odds - whereas personal speakers can ONLY get through to people who are already 'ready' to learn. Teachers are available for everyone, they are an amazing resource for many disadvantaged children, and they DO provide a valuable service, for all that middle-class people would like to keep poverty stricken areas in the gutter.

Break your own damn paradigm, and accept that just because YOU had a certain experience, doesn't make it applicable to EVERYONE. Everyone is unique, and everyone learns a different way. At the moment, superficial teaching via indirect means is vastly overvalued, and direct, one-on-one learning to people who wouldn't otherwise have it is undervalued.

Anyway, my point is: when trying to understand Steve's concepts and you're trying to "acid test" them, you need to have examples that hold up from many scenarios. My one example kind of breaks yours, so you need something more holistic.

I'm not 'trying to understand' Steve's concepts, I'm disagreeing with them. Learn the difference! Steve is one person, with one kind of world-view. I am a different person, with a different world-view. Since both my parents had to work full-time just to pay rent, without teachers I would have been pretty ****ed. What's more, millions of people also need and appreciate teachers. If 50% of people like being taught one-on-one, at an early age, by a good teacher, and 50% of people are home-schooled, untaught, or just didn't like school.... that doesn't mean one is better than the other, it just means we have to make sure that all forms of learning are accessible to everyone.

Money is attached to social value, not intrinsic value. Deal with it.

Just because something is a certain way, doesn't mean it's the best/most efficient way.

A very loving, heart-centered math teacher with 20 students is probably under-utilizing her gifts. She can do a lot more good by finding a way to share her love with more people. Dr. Barbara DeAngelis used to teach meditation workshops to tiny audiences. But she can make $1M per year from teaching relationship skills to larger groups.

That's nice for her - but meditation teachers are still needed. My point isn't that one is good and the other isn't, but that both are needed and one is significantly undervalued and the other is significantly overvalued.

Jack Canfield used to earn $20K per year as an educator. He learned he could make 10x that and more by teaching educators (more leverage). At first he wrote and sold books for teachers. Then he learned to broaden his audience to encompass more people. Should he have remained a teacher for $20K per year, or was it better for him to expand beyond that?

Again, nice for him - but he still needs educators to teach. We can't all be 'at the top'. We need people at every level, generating every kind of value. Discovering a new cure for cancer would be a brilliant contribution to society - but you still need nurses on the ground level to administer it. Developing more efficient systems for educating people is great - but you still need educators to actually go out and do it.

Kids need to be taught to read. Where their parents can't, or won't, a system has to be developed for them. Not everyone loves reading, but it is such an incredibly valuable skill that everyone should be taught it. You can't really teach reading/comprehension in groups of 60 or 100 people. You need individual one-on-one attention for it to work properly. Teachers - the system of teachers - generate an awful lot of value to society.

But the difference between $20k a year and $1 million is huge - ridiculously unbalanced, in fact. Yes, one might generate more social value than the other - but not THAT much more.