Teacher Training and Expertise in the US

[nykorn]

That’s weird—what you’re doing to your children. Letting people without any proper pedagogical training work as teachers shows the utmost disrespect for education and for the students IMHO.

Many countries do this, not just the USA. The alternative is to simply not have teachers, so you would get 60 or 100 kids in one classroom, and you would have entire schools shutting down because they can't find teaching staff. I agree that it's not ideal and that there are better ways to solve the teacher shortage, or better ways to train prospective teachers. However there is no way for a normal person to convince the state or national government to change this. It's true that the American government doesn't seem to value education -- if they did, education would be free, and they would base it off the education systems of the most highly educated countries in the world.

Keep in mind that in America there are also a lot of other fields unrelated to teaching, which require Bachelor's or Master's degrees in Europe but which only require high school graduation and/or work experience in America.

Also in many places in America parents can just homeschool their kids instead of having any qualified teacher teach them at all.