What percent of the population should be teachers?
In some sense, 100% - it takes a village and all that. More reasonably, maybe 5% or so to have pre-college teaching as their primary occupation. 22% of the US population in 2020 was under age 18, so this would give a comfortable class size of 5-15 (varying by subject), with some slack for admin and supervision.
You’re right, of course, that scale is the big problem—most people don’t WANT to spend the resources (money and human productivity) that is implied by universal good schooling. But they don’t want to admit that either, so they just complain. There are correlates here to cost disease in health care—the appearance of helping being more important than actually helping, and the political infeasibility of providing less service to the less-able-to-pay.
In some sense, 100% - it takes a village and all that. More reasonably, maybe 5% or so to have pre-college teaching as their primary occupation. 22% of the US population in 2020 was under age 18, so this would give a comfortable class size of 5-15 (varying by subject), with some slack for admin and supervision.
You’re right, of course, that scale is the big problem—most people don’t WANT to spend the resources (money and human productivity) that is implied by universal good schooling. But they don’t want to admit that either, so they just complain. There are correlates here to cost disease in health care—the appearance of helping being more important than actually helping, and the political infeasibility of providing less service to the less-able-to-pay.