We previously discussed the exodus from France of top earners after the imposition of a confiscatory 75% tax rate. Now England is facing the same shift, according to a new report. More than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million during 2009-10. That number fell to just 6,000 this year. This appears to be a combination of people leaving Britain and concerted efforts to avoid income.
We continue to disagree on this blog on tax policy. I opposed the moves in France and England as economically unwise. I also oppose aspects of the Obama plan, though I agree with the need to increase revenue. I believe both Obama and Congress have been incredibly reckless with their budgets and continue to spend wildly without any sense of priority in spending.
Cities like New York also report declines in top earner following heavy tax bills.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, announced this year that the 50p top rate will be reduced to 45p from next April.
Source: Telegraph
Stephen Grossman,
I’ve re-read all your posts in this thread, and after some thought have come to realize that you possess insight into the concept of conceptualization. I wasn’t easily convinced with your argument — until I spent a minute searching for confirmation of your perspective on the web — and found this press release from Deepaynpak University:
———————————————————————-
Conceptual Researchers Claim Concepts Do Not Require Conception
Press Release
Deepaynpak University
February 31, 2001
In what might be a breakthrough in conceptual reasoning, researchers at Deepaynpak University claim to have proven that conceptualization does not require the concept of conceptualizing.
“Conceiving is easy,” stated Dr. Lidute, “many people feel that conceptualizing the concepts that allow us to conceive our cognizance is onerous, but our research shows that this concept is conceptually flawed.”
According to Dr. Lidute and technician Marsha Bradayski, their research has integrated heretofore separate conceptual concepts into a more conceptualized form of conceptualization which will allow concepts to be conceived with greater conceptional accuracy.
“It’s like Newton conceiving gravity, or Einstein conceiving that dice do work,” stated Marsha
Bradayski, “our conceptual research shows that if one can conceive something the conception must be true, otherwise how was the concept conceived?”
——————————————————————-
The full press release can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/crpgynr
@Stephen: the pattern is conceptualized by selectively focusing on (abstracting) its similarities to other patterns in a context of differences from other patterns.
Bull. That doesn’t happen. Ever.
It doesn’t even make sense as written! How does one “focus” on “similarities”? That requires pattern recognition itself. Your whole definition is recursive, it depends upon itself, and therefore means nothing.
We do not recognize patterns and then look for “similarities” which are, of course, themselves “patterns.” There is no such thing as “conceptualization” as you define it, that does not happen in the human mind. Perhaps you think it does, but it doesn’t.
What really happens is very much like what happens in nature; small patterns are recognized and bigger patterns are built up from that. In the visual cortex, we have neurons specialized to do nothing but fire if a vertical line appears in a few pixels of the retina (a pixel being the output of a rod or cone); others recognize horizontal lines, curvature, and diagonals. Just like the Windows graphical interface is composed of a handful of tools (buttons, slide bars, checkboxes, tabs, etc) which serve to make an infinite variety of programs, our vision is composed of a few dozen tiny patterns we naturally detect, put together in infinite combinations.
Small patterns contribute to larger patterns. You have it backwards, we do not recognize big patterns and then compare them, we recognize small patterns. If we know dogs but have never seen a cat, we at first think a cat is some variant of a dog. We don’t think the cat is something NEW and try to find similarities, we think it is something OLD (a dog) with variances, and then the weight of the variances makes us bifurcate our model. But that is done hierarchically, we take what is common among dogs and cats (and squirrels, raccoons and other beasts) and that becomes a generic model of “animal”, and the specifics have differences from that model.
But that model is not a model of absolute commonality, it is a model of probabilistic commonality. The model animal has “fur,” but for some animals (the naked mole rat) the exception is they do not have fur. Our generic model of a “person” is that they have hands and feet, because probabilistically that is highly likely, but that doesn’t prevent us from recognizing somebody as a person if they are born without hands or feet.
The brain reduces information to probabilistic models. Consciously one can compare two models to make clear distinctions, but that is not what is happening in the brain.
The brain builds up larger patterns from collections of smaller patterns that seem to occur together. There is no need to make any kind of explicit comparison; when we see something new then it will be composed of smaller features. Whatever model we have in our mind that explains the most important of the smaller features will come to mind; because in the competition within the mind for resources the neurons for that model are getting the most inputs. Then there is an assessment of the unexplained features; and they do the same thing, recursively.
So my wife, driving to my daughter’s house, says she saw some crazy “dog” on the edge of the woods, but it had really big ears like a “rabbit”. The predominant trigger is “dog like”, but in her mind the ears don’t belong, and makes her doubt she is seeing a dog.
The mind doesn’t find a pattern and then look for sub-patterns, it finds sub-patterns, and when they occur together more often than not, it forms collections of those, and when those collections occur together more often than not, it forms collections of those. Those will fire even if all the sub-components are not present. You will recognize a dog with three legs as a dog, you will recognize a dog without fur as a dog, you will recognize a flat-faced pug without a snout as a dog, and a dog without a tail as a dog. Under certain circumstances you may mistakenly recognize a cat or a raccoon or a baby deer as a dog.
Your description is backward reasoning. We do not look for similarities, similarities come first, and then we look for differences. This is even reflected in our language: We say X is like Y except (here are the differences). We take note of the exceptions to something we already know, and that language reflects the way our minds actually work.
SG,
Could you please define the following phrases:
“. . . conceptually organized science . . .”
“. . . non-conceptual pattern recognition . . .”
“. . . reduce conceptual science to arbitrary and conventional associations among patterns . . .”
“. . . the pattern is conceptualized by selectively focusing on (abstracting) its similarities to other patterns in a context of differences from other patterns . . .”
In the last quoted phrase it would be nice if you also explain how, “selectively focusing,” equates to, “abstracting.”
Good luck.
No, SG, I am a trained animal psychologist.
Brute animals do more than observe. You are totally wrong on that point. Completely & absolutely wrong. Chimps and dolphins make and use tools. Animals have reasoning.
Scientists finally came out recently to confirm they have consciousness.
Tony C.
“Nobody ‘integrates concepts.’ They learn things.”
So true, learning is vastly underrated as are accepted meanings of words so as to encourage accurate communications.
Zombie,
1, December 15, 2012 at 3:06 pm
@Stephen, Bron: Aristotle did not know anything, Aristotle was a mystic and reasoning from mystical principles, just as Rand was reasoning from false premises. When one starts from wildly false premises as they did, then even if the reasoning is flawless (and Aristotle’s was not, and Rand’s certainly was not) then no conclusions are known to be right or wrong. The less predictive the original premises, the more probable it is the conclusions are wrong.
This is proof that modern education is worse than worthless. Its a danger to man’s mind. Aristotle is the leading realist besides Rand. His rejection of Plato’s mysticism helped cause the Renaissance. His use of observation to start and guide knowledge is repeated throughout his philosophy and science. Reasoning starts from true premises. Your claim that reasoning can start from false premises merely exposes your subjectivism and mysticism.
Aristotle discovered scientific method, ie, the basic cause of the 17th century rise of modern science. He taught man to reason systematically. No one before him did that. His errors of omission and commission are irrelevant because his basic ideas provided a rationally systematic method for identifying error. He was the first person to explicitly identify contradiction as the basic error in reasoning. He created the first system of logic, whatever its errors. His discovery of the principles of deductive logic and his systemizing of informal fallacies are in university logic texts today, whatever errors he made. He taught man how to systematically focus mind onto reality.
He created the sciences of biology, psychology, meteorology, political science, literary criticism, etc. Darwin called him the best biologist in history. The identification of the process of induction was done on the basis of his philosophy. He discovered the method of rationally classifying concrete facts.
Your out-of-context focus upon his errors, presumably in physics and astronomy, is proof only of your mystical reliance upon convention rather than observation. Your zombie psychology is a rejection of rational system, ie science. Mindless bodies are not systematic. They just flop around, moment to moment, until they fall over a cliff.
Zombie,
December 14, 2012 at 2:56 pm
> Neurons learn to match patterns,
Neurons act mechanically, like like a hit baseball. Learning is an action of consciousness, perceptual or conceptual. Youre a neo-primitive mystic, believing in spirits in trees, rocks, etc. Patterns are not in nature but in a consciousness of nature. Nature just is. A pattern is nature as known by a consciousness.
@Bron: That is not “integrating concepts,” that is just “pattern recognition,” and it is probabilistic pattern recognition at that. Neurons learn to match patterns, but they are “noisy,” not perfect. They sometimes fire when they shouldn’t, and sometimes fail to fire when they should. The tuft of the lion’s tail does not necessarily mean a lion is there. For a better example, we are extremely prone to mistaking various harmless things as snakes; including sticks, roots, even feces.
This is not “integrating concepts,” it isn’t even usually a conscious act, but when it is it is called “learning.”
Sensory inputs (of all kinds, including just patterns of movement independent of any particular object) eventually trigger specific neural clusters that fire in recognition of the pattern. neural patterns that fire together usually get their own neural cluster to represent that meta-pattern (a pattern of patterns occurring together). That occurs recursively; it is how some people can recognize on sight that a painting they have never seen before is in the style of Matisse.
These associations occur in the brain without any conscious effort; it is how infants learn language without using logic, and how they learn to associate heights and falling with pain, or in fact learn to anticipate many things they like and dislike before they have any language or explicit reasoning capability.
I am opposed to using made up language to describe common concepts that already have words. On the one hand, it is egotistical or a fraudulent attempt at sounding “important” and “scientific.” On the other hand, it is a common way to claim some process is more mystical or mysterious than it actually is; which would be too apparent if the plain English word were used.
There is no “integrating of concepts.” There is pattern recognition and there is learning. Neurons automatically, without any consciousness, in Petri dishes, will learn by repetition to fire when certain inputs are present, or the reverse (fire when inputs are expected and NOT present: For example, when you reach without looking to grab a cup and do not feel it).
This is not some conscious thing; the brain is an anticipation machine, it is constantly working, in a billion parallel paths, to know what to expect next and firing up when that doesn’t happen to try and reconcile what did happen with what was expected. The fundamental “emotion” at the neuron level is surprise, or “Wait, WTF?” (If that happens enough, the neuron learns it isn’t unusual, it is part of the pattern).
The point, in mice and in men, is to anticipate what happens next. Categorization is a very small part of what is going on; consciousness is a very small part of what is going on. In one square inch of skin you have over 700 different sensors for pain, pressure, temperature, and more. Your brain has tens of thousands of neurons actively monitoring every one of those square inches constantly, to see if they act as expected.
In your visual system you may think nothing is happening as the background does not change, but actually neurons are actively expecting that persistence of vision and if something changes they fire to bring attention to the change.
The same thing for all your senses, a sudden noise, smell, taste, touch or itch all raise alarms because they are unexpected by some unconscious little network of neurons that raises an alert to higher pattern recognition areas, which may or may not reach consciousness, depending on how busy the conscious mind is dealing with other issues.
The brain, and how it works, is explained just fine by common words using their common meanings. Pattern recognition. Learning. Attention. Anticipation. Discrepancy, partial matches, and so on.
Rand’s explanations are pretentious BS invented out of thin air and designed to bamboozle. Nobody “integrates concepts.” They learn things.
tony c:
how do you categorize plants and animals into genus and species if you do not recognize patterns?
We all know what catness is and can recognize it in an animal. Same for canines.
how come we can see just the tuft on a lions tail above the tall grass and say to our selves danger? We could not if we did not integrate concepts.
@Fool: I do not give a crap about “conceptual pattern recognition,” that doesn’t mean anything. What I care about is observation, it makes no difference to me if my observations do not fit your preconceived notions of what I should observe, just like I don’t care whether my observations match what Aristotle expected (he thought rational thought occurred in the heart).
As for “conventional dictionary definitions:” Damn straight. Claims have no meaning or basis in reality if you can just redefine words to mean anything you want. Thinking otherwise is idiotic.
I AM claiming your view is false. That is not contextual, fool, that is saying your view does not comport with observed reality, it does not predict what we will observe in experiments or in the field or under the microscope, it does not provide any predictive power whatsoever. False.
Zombie
1, December 14, 2012 at 11:09 am
@Fool: I do not give a crap about “conceptual pattern recognition,” that doesn’t mean anything.
It doesnt mean anything to brute animals, children, primitives and evaders. After the perceptual (observational) recognition of a pattern, the pattern is conceptualized by selectively focusing on (abstracting) its similarities to other patterns in a context of differences from other patterns. We buy a bag of apples without worrying about differences among the apples. Apples have certain similarties to each other that differentiate them from pears, plums, etc. That consciousness of similarity and difference is the concept, apple. Brute animals can be aware of similarities or differences but not integrated in the same consciousness.
>it makes no difference to me if my observations do not fit your preconceived notions of what I should observe,
Im not discussing what one should observe. After observation, man, unlike brute animals, has the ability to process the observations by abstracting similarities against a background of differences, as we do when we distinguish rocks from flowers. Brute animals randomly associate perceptions. Only man identifies and integrates perceptions. Man, via concepts, can focus his mind on, eg, the basic similarity between a small and a large table by means of which he distinguishes both from chairs, beds,& couches. He abstracts the similarity, temporarily the differences among different sizes and kinds of tables and integrates the abstractions into a concept ,table, that refers to all things which have those similarities and differences. Man does this subconsciously for things close to the perceptual level but must conceptualize the process of conceptualizing for more abstract concepts as he abstracts from abstractions for wider or more precise concepts. Eg, Einstein used math to build a chain of abstractions from Babylonian observations of stars to E=MC/2. Its more complex than this (see Rand’s Epistemology) but Ive indicated the process.
There are no preconceptions except in religion or in rationalizations of religion such as behaviorism. Concepts are logically organized perceptions regardless of the length of the hierarchical chain.
>As for “conventional dictionary definitions:” Damn straight. Claims have no meaning or basis in reality if you can just redefine words to mean anything you want.
Youve many times evaded a defense of conventional meaning, ie, you have none. The alternative to convention is not the arbitrary but observation-based and conceptually organized definitions. You remain a scientific fraud.
>I AM claiming your view is false. That is not contextual, fool, that is saying your view does not comport with observed reality,
Ie, your claim exists in the context of observed reality. My claim exists in the context of conceptually observed reality. Brute animals merely observe and thats it. Man always, this side of deep psychosis anyway, has some concepts that identify and integrate his perceptions.
@Stephen: Like all religionists, you claim to embrace science while rejecting any science that disagrees with the answers you want to hear, the received knowledge of your dead heroes of a bygone age that invented a mythological “science” of explaining the world by making stuff up. You are no different than the aboriginal cave men worshiping the sun god, except you are even less predictive than they. Continue wasting your life, Stephen.
Zombie,
I value observation-based and conceptually organized science, as Newton used to discover universal gravity. You value science based on arbitrary and conventional dictionary definitions and non-conceptual pattern recognition, as positivists used to deny atomic theory. Note that Im not claiming that your view is false because that, too, is contextual. I am, however, identifying the limit of your value.
Zombie,
1, December 13, 2012 at 9:54 am
>The brain is modular. There is evidence for that in the work of evolutionary psychologists like Pinker, Bloom, and Baumeister;
Garbage in, garbage out. Modern mainstream scientists philosophically reject man’s conceptual/volitional consciousness before they consider science ,thus will not look for its physical basis. And evading self-consciousness as a scientific method, they have no way to experience the integration of consciousness. They are like computers responding to man. Evolutionary psychology is limited by man’s conceptual/volitional consciousness. Something happened after evolution stopped in man’s brain and you dont know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?!
Zombie,
@Stephen: You long ago regressed to insult.
You regard logical criticism as personal insult, a necessary implicaton of your reduction of logic to psychology. But I criticize your conceptual choices, not your psychology. If I criticized your psychology, I would need to take a long shower.
>I am not regressing, I am stating the facts as I see them,
Obviously, you are conceptually regressing and, within that context of the conceptual power of children, you, indeed, and with a perverse honesty, are stating the facts as you see them.
>Science is on my side
The intellectually corrupt whores in the universities are on your side, the nihilists who reduce conceptual science to arbitrary and conventional associations among patterns. Of course you want to sacrifice the sub-human self you chose to create. I’d flush it down a toilet if it got close to me. Excuse me, I must wash my hands.
@Stephen: You long ago regressed to insult. I am not regressing, I am stating the facts as I see them, but I am not going to try and justify them, because it is a waste of my time: You will just deny them without proof, without science, without logic, just your own loopy moon language quotes from your fellow psychopath Ayn Rand.
Science is on my side; you have subscribed to an intentional fiction that a psychopath realized after the fact could be turned into a con game.
You are wrong. The philosophy is stupid and anti-scientific because it is based on false assumptions and counter-factual arguments. I really don’t care if you believe that or not, the evidence is the evidence, your belief doesn’t change the reality of it. In fact I think it is hilariously ironic how much reality Objectivists deny because it doesn’t fit Rand’s ludicrous philosophy.
Zombie
1, December 13, 2012 at 2:53 pm
@Stephen: I saw what you wrote. It is false. Wrong. Stupid. So is your subsequent comment. False. Wrong. Stupid. Anti-Scientific.
Youre regressing to a child’s conceptualizing power. “Ma, Tommy hit me. No, Billy stinks. No, youre pants are on fire. I hate you. Eat poo. Shut up, fathead!”
Zombie.
1, December 13, 2012 at 9:54 am
@Bron: The little I know about the brain seems to suggest the entire organ is physically integrated with every other part, front to back; top to bottom; left to right.
>Then you know something that isn’t true. The brain is modular. There is evidence for that in the work of evolutionary
This anti-scientific materialism is rationalization for conceptual disintegration. Consciousness is an integrate because the brain is. Instead of studying healthy brains, these quacks study sick brains and generalize from sickness. Its the cause of their equivalent perversion of morality from a guide to life to a rationalization for the sacrifice of life.
@Stephen: I saw what you wrote. It is false. Wrong. Stupid. So is your subsequent comment. False. Wrong. Stupid. Anti-Scientific.
Zombie.
1, December 13, 2012 at 9:54 am
@Bron: The little I know about the brain seems to suggest the entire organ is physically integrated with every other part, front to back; top to bottom; left to right.
Then you know something that isn’t true. The brain is modular. There is evidence for that in the work of evolutionary
This anti-scientific materialism is rationalization for conceptual disintegration. Consciousness is an integrate because the brain is. Instead of studying healthy brains, these quacks study sick brains and generalize from sickness.
@Bron: I don’t know what you mean by an “integrated organ.” Yes, distinct structures do communicate with each other. But the effect that you claim as part of being an “integrated organ,” whatever you mean by that, is not evident in experimentation with people that have lost parts of their brain due to stroke, disease or injury.
So sure, there is a part of your brain that facilitates the transfer and translation of short term (electrochemical) memory to long term (physically represented) memory. If that is damaged, then it can have widespread effects on other modules that depend on it.
But in general, the “robustness” I am talking about is specifically antithetical to your premise, the point of robustness is that a person can lose some abilities without affecting their other capabilities. For example, a literary publishing editor may lose the ability to recognize people’s faces but retain 100% of their ability to read and follow a fictional adventure, like the entire Harry Potter series of novels. They can summarize it, answer questions about it, invent alternative outcomes, discern plot holes, all with no discernible difference in their capability.
Think of it like sensory functions, which are also ultimately in the brain. If brain damage causes you to become deaf, that doesn’t affect your ability to find the derivative of an equation. If a stroke makes you lose feeling in your left hand, that does not imply you will be incapable of recognizing faces.
The brain is modular and to a great extent modules are independent. It is integrated in the sense that modules do communicate with each other, and some modules depend upon inputs from other modules to get their job done, but there is NOT a path of dependence from every module to every other module. That would be fragile. Nature has evolved some fragile systems, certainly, but the brain does not happen to be one of them; evolutionary pressures have selected for a more robust, often fail-safe organization with fewer inter-dependencies.
This robustness is what allowed Gabrielle Giffords to be shot in the head, through-and-through from front to back with skull fragments embedded in her brain, and still survive to walk, talk, see, and reason. That would not have happened without modern medical technology; but modern medical technology did not replace the many destroyed parts of her brain. Yet she is still capable of recovering and learning; for example she is learning to write with her left hand instead of her right.
tony c:
i agree that there are different distinct structures within the brain, I am just saying the brain is an integrated organ.
@Bron: The little I know about the brain seems to suggest the entire organ is physically integrated with every other part, front to back; top to bottom; left to right.
Then you know something that isn’t true. The brain is modular. There is evidence for that in the work of evolutionary psychologists like Pinker, Bloom, and Baumeister; there is also TONS of evidence for that in stroke studies and brain tumor studies where random parts of people’s brains have been killed. To a lesser extent we can study injuries that kill parts of the brain, like a nail gun injury, gun injury, falls, darts, arrows, etc that penetrate the brain. More recently, transcranial magnetic interference can temporarily disable very localized regions in a healthy brain, and that also shows the modularity.
By “modularity” I mean that the brain is not a homogenized Jello, it has distinct modules responsible for different functions. This is actually more evident in males than females; even on an fMRI of healthy brains, and explains the difference in stroke outcomes by gender. Males that have strokes tend to lose whole distinct functions without recovery, while other functions remain intact. Females tend to lose many functions but recover most of them; because their mental functionality is more distributed throughout the brain than it is in males, and a small dead area can be rebuilt and re-enabled, while for the male it becomes a build-from-scratch proposition for a lost function.
(Interestingly, this physical organization of the brain is partially reversed in self-identified lifelong homosexuals; which suggests the gender of the brain and gender of the body really are mismatched. Homosexual males experience strokes more like heterosexual females; homosexual females experience strokes more like heterosexual males.)
So that is how we know the brain is modular. The amygdala is involved in processing emotions (particularly fear), but people that have lost their amygdala due to stroke feel no fear. None of the cues of anxiety or fear or emotional distress show up in them. They can be perfectly rational, solve problems, do calculus if they knew it before their stroke. But they have difficulty picking out a shirt and tie, because all they have is rationality, and their missing amygdala never makes a decision. So they will stand in the closet for hours, until they get physically tired or have to go to the restroom, spinning reasons for choosing one shirt over another. They suffer “analysis paralysis,” they cannot decide because the rational mind serves the emotional mind, and the missing amygdala isn’t weighing in.
They don’t get bored, that is an emotion. They don’t get frustrated, they don’t get angry, or embarrassed at their inability, they don’t worry about missing an appointment or wasting time because there is nothing else they WANT to do, wanting to do something else is an emotion. (unless it is prompted by physical conditions like hunger, thirst, tired muscles, heat or cold discomfort, the need to eliminate waste, etc). The only reason they are in the closet is because they were asked to do that by the researcher and complied, because they have no urge to fight it.
When we see the amygdala lighting up in normal brains during these decisions; and the decisions cannot be made when the amygdala has died, we can guess with pretty high confidence the amygdala is essential to such decisions. The rest of the evidence is in the fact that strokes affecting virtually every other part of the brain do NOT have this same effect.
The brain is more like a network of millions of modules than it is a single module. It is also resilient; brain injuries are survivable. Even after severe strokes that create much disability, people that know the victim can still recognize their personality, the victims can still have memories of their life and often still mentally execute their former profession. An orthopedic surgeon may be physically paralyzed, but still remember everything correctly about being an orthopedic surgeon and solving the professional problems encountered. Which may make them a medical school professor or consultant or textbook author instead of a practicing surgeon.
So yes, I believe the comparisons are valid. The brain is not a fragile system where nothing can fail. It is more like the Internet, where Google can go down but eBay and Amazon might not even notice.
There is evolutionary advantage in the modularity, it creates robustness (the opposite of fragility in systems). Evolutionarily speaking, modularity and a “small world” network makes many injuries survivable; whereas the model of “everything affects everything” means every injury is catastrophic.
@Stephen: The first concern of selfless people is to enjoy success. That is not necessarily done by relieving pain; look at a grade school teacher. There is an element of selflessness in that profession, they are underpaid and overworked and usually under-appreciated. All of those are emotionally painful for the teacher, for some the pain is so great they drop out of teaching.
So they certainly are not stopping or decreasing their own pain; a characteristic of selflessness is enduring emotional pain because they feel something else is more important than the pain.
Second, a good grade school teacher knows they are doing no favors to their charges by handing out undeserved A’s and B’s when the child deserves an F. Doing that may please the child and the child’s parents (thus avoiding pain for others), but it sets the child up for future failure. So the good grade school teacher will grade fairly, without flinching at the pain it may cause for a child’s ego, or a parent’s ego, because what the good grade school teacher wants is for the child to succeed. But for 99.9% of us, success comes with work and the emotional pains of doing what we dislike, being wrong, losing competitions and various other failures. Those failures are the teaching moments, and the good grade school teachers know they run a life training camp.
In education emotional pain is manageable, but unavoidable. Not all challenges are met, not every child is the smartest child in the class, and children are immature and can be cruel, abusive, and blind to the emotional pain they cause their teachers. (The same goes for the parents of the children!)
So why do the teachers endure it? It isn’t for the money; a teacher not only graduates college but has to take and pass extra courses and tests to teach children. If it was about the money, they could earn more in a 40 hour week (instead of the 60+ it takes to be a good grade school teacher) as an accountant, nurse, programmer, or mid-level manager, any number of other 9-5 type jobs.
Teacher endure it because they believe they are contributing to the future success of the children they teach. The job isn’t about relieving their own pain or preventing pain, in fact the job requires the occasional infliction of some necessary emotional pain when informing children they have failed.
The job is about making the world a better place, in their eyes. It is the feeling of contributing to success that motivates them, and makes their own pain and the pain they had to inflict worth it. To them, it is worth the lower pay and longer hours, worth the frustration, insults and ingratitude, because they feel they have made a positive difference in the world.
Tony C.
Trying to explain what selfless is like to a selfish person, is like teaching a monkey how to roller-skate…..
actually, I think it might be easier to teach the monkey to roller-skate….