It's quite the same with the otherwise inexplicable drum-beat of animosity directed, in the United States, against primary and secondary school teachers. Schoolteachers, of course, are the very definition of those who chose a socially important and high-minded vocation in the full knowledge that it would involve low pay and stressful conditions. One becomes a teacher because one wants to have a positive impact on others' lives. (As a New York subway recruiting ad used to say, "No one ever called someone up twenty years later to thank them for being such an aspiring insurance claims adjuster.") Yet again, this seems to be what makes them fair game in the eyes of all those who denounce them as spoiled, entitled, overpaid spouters of secular humanist anti-Americanism. Granted, one can understand why Republican activists target teachers' unions. Teachers' unions are one of the mainstays of support for the Democratic Party. But teachers' unions include both teachers and school administrators, the latter being those actually responsible for most of the policies most Republican activists object to. So why not focus on them? It would have been much easier for them to make a case that the school administrators are overpaid parasites than that teachers are coddled and spoiled. As Eli Horowitz noted: What's remarkable about this is that Republicans and other conservatives actually did complain about school administrators-but then they stopped. For whatever reason, those voices (which were few and quiet to begin with) dwindled to nonexistence almost as soon as the conversation began. In the end, the teachers themselves turned out to be the more valid political targets, even though they do the more valuable work. Again, I think this can only be put down to moral envy. Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying "Thank you, thank you for all you did for me." For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (72%)