Teachers deserve a better salary and conditions of service than doctors. Speak for or against the motion

I think you’d be hard pressed to find many people who would say that doctors are more important than teachers, or vice versa. They both serve essential functions in society.

My guess is the question is more about why doctors make more money than teachers. That answer seems relatively straightforward - supply and demand. But before we make that assumption, let’s check our work.

There are a little over three million teachers in the US[1] . There are ~850,000 active physicians in the US[2]. Of course, those numbers don’t tell the entire story - there are ~51,000,000 school-age children in the US[3] , while there are around 324,000,000 people in total (as of this writing)[4] .

So how many school-age students per teacher does that give? Here’s some real hand-waving, but in a combined grade school the average number of students per classroom is 16.6[5] . I realize it’s higher for departmentalized instruction and at younger levels, but we’re shooting for ballpark numbers here, and those numbers fit the rough estimates for total number of students and teachers (those independently work out to 17 students per teacher nationwide.)