Plan B Forum

That one *REALLY* need more of an explanation in order to make any sense of it...

Huh? In China, the profession of teaching is held in the highest esteem. In Israel, what's a teacher? In the USA and the UK, not much is expected of the profession.

What's so difficult? Wait - Eco, do you live in Israel?

More explanations indeed. Just what was actually measured to produce this graph? Does the topic headline claim expectations is the same as status?

What is a "Teachers Status Index"? and how is it determined?

MajGenl.Meade wrote:What's so difficult?

Well...I see oldr and snailgate beat me to the first two questions I had.

I wonder how it's even possible to attempt to quantify something like "status" or "expectations", let alone to measure the same abstract idea across all those different nationalities and cultures. And why those 21 particular nations?

There are also a lot of questions about the peculiarities of those particular rankings. I guess it makes sense that the US and the UK are somewhere near the middle...but why would Singapore rank so much lower than China when the population of Singapore is almost completely ethnically Chinese? Why would Japan rank so much lower than China and South Korea? (That sure doesn't correlate with any of the Japanese people I've personally known!) And I know that "Jewish" ≠ "Israeli" but all the Jews I know (and the few Israelis I know) respect and value education a LOT, so it surprises me that teachers would have such low status in the one Jewish nation in the world.

I would like to see a lot more of the definitions, methodology, etc. before deciding what to think of this graph.

The graph is normalized so that the highest score is automatically 100 with all others ranked against that. There is a subtle but important point in understanding the high ranking for China. They are a much more rigidly heirarchical society which does not encourage individuals to rank things socially themselves only to learn and repeat the rankings the culture teaches them. So I don't think you are measuring exactly the same thing there as you are in the ruggedly individualistic U.S. of A. .

If we wanted the profession to improve we would treat them with more respect.




yrs,
rubato

Plus it helps that in the PRC you are either a teacher or a peasant, and the latter is not such a respected profession.

If only they had more lawyers, used-car salespersons and politicians...

MajGenl.Meade wrote:Plus it helps that in the PRC you are either a teacher or a peasant, and the latter is not such a respected profession.

If only they had more lawyers, used-car salespersons and politicians...

Rip Van Winkle, I presume?


yrs,
rubato

rubato wrote:If we wanted the profession to improve we would treat them with more respect.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Yet another term that needs a definition...

How do you quantify or measure any of these abstract concepts?...and do you measure them relative to something else, or as singular, absolute values? Are there words in Mandarin, in Greek, in Turkish, in Korean, in Arabic, in Finnish, in Portuguese, in German, in Hebrew, which have the same meanings and connotations as the English words "status" and "respect" and "expectations"? If the graph is the result of some sort of survey, how many people were surveyed, and who translated the questions into 16 different languages, and how?