Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
Teachers should be paid according to how much their students learn. Give specific reasons and examples to support your opinion. |
In this era, where money happens to be the most important value, people mistakenly believe that the market system will somehow solve everything. However, I believe that there are things that cannot be quantified, and should not be judged by materialistic value and the relationship between students and teachers is one of them. Paying teachers according to how much their students learn is a bad idea because it makes teachers only focus on enhancing students’ memory of shallow knowledge and sends a wrong message to the society. Firstly, the payment system that is based on the amount of knowledge that students acquire will discourage teachers to teach students important values of lives. In the system, the schools will inevitably uses the system of testing the quantity of knowledge that students can show based on their short term memorization skills. Then, the teachers will only focus on the exam questions that will be on these tests while teaching students. Consequently, the teachers will spend less time on talking about values and meanings of life that should be taught at schools. Because of this materialistic value that the schools put on the knowledge that students learn, teachers will be forced to teach only superficial level of knowledge which is hampering the current learning system at school. Secondly, the adoption of the new payment system will send a wrong message to the society that the relationship between teachers and students are only based on money. A lot of teachers have beliefs that their preaching before students may influence their lives and even change the world at the end of the day. However, this system actively promotes a notion that teachers’ job is only to deliver academic information and the amount of the information students acquire only matters. A certain level of pressure on teachers that they should effectively deliver knowledge to students may work and stimulate them to work harder, but labeling their relationship as ‘materialistic’ removes responsibility that teachers have in the long run to make students better, which society should never encourage. In summary, financial incentive to the teachers would never work rather it will insult most of the teachers who care about students’ future, beliefs, and lives in general. Society should never force teachers to only focus on enhancing students’ short term memory. Students may benefit much more by sharing the value and meaning of life with their teachers than by memorizing what happened during the World War. Money is unnecessary to teach students what’s important in their lives, therefore the payment system according to how much students learn will never work. |