Teachers' Pension Funds And The Parent-Teacher Meeting Of The Future

We hear of state-level "XYZ teachers' pension funds" as clients to big financial organizations. While being associated with a financial organization was in the past a good thing for teachers because the financial organizations were considered role-models of society, given the current negative perceptions of financial organizations, these teachers/future pensioners may find themselves considered greedy, undisciplined or generally of a bad character due to their association with the big financial organizations.

Even when there is evaluation of how the teachers are doing their jobs by financial organizations that are working in the guise of local or national government, this evaluation will ultimately be driven by the logic that if the teachers do their jobs better, their pension funds will be better, and consequently, the financial organizations themselves will be better rewarded. Nowhere will the benefit of a proper education to a child be mentioned in all this supervision and evaluation.

In the future, there will be a secret preferential treatment of the students by the teachers based on which parents are able to give the best investment advice and tips in the parents-teachers meetings. The merits of the parents will decide the fate of the children: the children in the classroom will be considered vehicles of investment tips and advice that they have learned from their parents; contributions to class will be interpreted based on the finances of the teachers and how they could be made better. In recognizing the importance of the pension and the pension fund, we must be critical of the idea that teachers determine the quality of the future of their students, because we may find that students determine the quality of the future of their teachers to an even higher degree.

Eventually, a particular branch of economics, a kind of “macro-economics-by-elementary-school-kids” will be born and taken seriously, and TV shows such as “Are You Smarter Than A 5^th Grader?” will re-emerge with much more advanced material; some 5^th graders will become well educated enough in advanced finance and macro-economics to be hired by the big financial organizations with teachers as middle-men/agents as well as clients. Economics will be a major subject of study from the earliest years of school education, and it will be seemingly concerned about the world economy, but also blatantly anxious about the pension fund. Open class discussion will blatantly focus on the health of the pension funds and seek advice from the smarter 5^th graders. Unlike in the young-adult and adult world, the anxiety over finances and the future does not need to be hidden from the youngest section of the populace, which means there is a far more productive environment for the discussion and problem-solving of the financial issues in the elementary school classrooms. Thus, we hear today of how the university is linked to the big financial organizations, but we may find elementary schools with even more effective relationships with big financial organizations in the future.