Most teachers who *really* care have been more or less pushed out of teaching. It's now about turnover and profit, not education. Most teachers long ago gave up trying to be a role model in addition to all their other duties. With the business managers running the schools, quality is an optional extra -- and this is the environment most parents are handing over the growth of their children to.

I've done some teaching and I can tell you that between the crap attitude of most of the students and the penny-pinching demonstrated by management you can either give up on giving the kids a real future or leave. Not much of a choice.

I have some elderly friends who, from memory, spent a huge proportion of their lives teaching at public schools. They now live in a caravan beyond the outer suburbs not because they want to, but because they can't afford anything better.

Meanwhile, colleges continue to pump out graduates with no useful skills. My qualifications only qualified me to teach more people the same qualifications -- there's no job at the end of the pyramid. When there are already several hundred unemployed IT people in a community actively looking for work, why are several hundred more spat out of tertiary studies each year? Because students aren't "the future" anymore, they're "customers" -- and parting them with their money is all a business ever cares about these days.