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Your point about the lack of competence of the teachers is well taken. Although most of us can recall teachers who stood out as excellent, inspiring, and even mentors, most teachers are not recruited from the most talented students in our most competitive colleges and universities.

I still think more of us should stop complaining about the schools and get into the schools. There's a teacher shortage right now, and it's becoming easier to get certified (at least in Georgia) if one already has a college degree.

The pay and working conditions don't equal those in many more "prestigious" careers, but if all the good students choose other jobs, only the second-rate students are left to teach.

Although society pays lip service to education, and it is essential to success...

Society says education is important, but at the same time denigrates teachers.....

You make good points, but historically, in the US, teaching has always been an occupation strangely regarded. Important, given all of the Puritan and other colonists early emphasis on education, but not terribly prestigious. The reasons for this are many, in part because of the traditional English suspicion of things intellectual - smelling of the lamp is the old saw, in part because it was seen as something a young man (or young woman later) without independent means could do at the outset of his career after his own schooling. By the mid-19th century, while every town sought to establish common public schools, the school and its master/marm were paid only with what locally was raised in taxes or fees, often not much. Hence the field often did not attract the sort of teachers calculated to raise the prestige of the job. The only teachers in America who ever had social prestige were university professors up through the 1950s. Many of them were younger sons of the upper class, with some independent means, hence the low pay was no deterent, and their class standing did not depend on their positions, rather their status enhanced the status of the position. That changed again in the 1950s - 1970's as the influx of boomers saw the hiring of many who got their credentials on the GI Bill from WWII, men and women who didn't fit the mold and who were careerists.