I don’t know if this attitude is a cause or an effect of the failures in the American education system. In many other countries, especially in Asia, teachers are respected if not outright revered. Their status is often comparable to medical doctors and other professional classes. So people who choose to teach are not seen as unfit to engage in other endeavors. But in America there’s this undercurrent of contempt for those who would choose to teach. It just seems like a rather self-defeating attitude for a society to have, especially in a world where knowledge is the ultimate competitive advantage. It seems like our current anti-science, pro-ignorance culture is more or less an inevitable outcome of such an attitude.