Making a small amount does not mean you are not overpaid. A salary is a price for service. Prices are based on availability and demand of the commodity. The demand for teachers is artificially inflated by government fiat, but the availability STILL far outstrips the need, and so their salaries remain what they think of as too low. Meanwhile they are unionized in the public schools in gross violation of the rationale behind collective bargaining, to which even such pro-labor politicians as FDR & Frances Perkins were strongly opposed.

What's more, people are being taxed to pay those salaries regardless of whether or not they choose, or even have the capacity, to partake of the services. You don't pay a mail tax, you pay the post office when you send something. You don't pay a water tax, you get billed by the city based on your water usage. It's not a constant or universal service, like military, police & fire, so there is no rationale for it, and in many communities, where the only revenue is property taxes, the school is far and away the largest expense, to the extent that the education cartel's protectors don't allow it to be included in municipal budgets, and make it all but impossible for the elected representatives to curtail its spending. Educational spending as well is out of track with ordinary spending practices, in that failure is rewarded with increasing remuneration.

All of this is for absolutely nothing that normal people are incapable of doing for themselves. I was taught to read and write by my mother. I was taught principles of mathematics by my father, often after the classroom failed to get the concept across to me. I learned the more complicated principles of those subjects in a church basement, taught largely by housewives and retirees on what was euphemistically called a "sacrifical wage". I was apparently deprived of the mainstream social experience to the extent that I have never been arrested, nor caused property damage while intoxicated nor participated in an unplanned pregnancy throughout by adolescent experience, and when I protested in my first semester of college being made to relearn fundamental concepts of grammar that I learned in second grade, my "professor" snapped "Not everyone here went to Harvard second grade." We were learning the terms "noun" and "verb". Everyone in that class had received diplomas from NJ schools, and passed a state-administered basic skills test upon acceptance into the college. And even with that screening process, the education establishment still could not guarantee that adults knew what a noun or verb was. I have seen no evidence that the teaching profession has improved at all, especially not after occasionally glancing at my nephews' homework last week, when family members had to babysit them since the state babysitting service ends at three.

I have learned far more on my own studies, or through tutoring or teaching, than I ever had rammed down my throat in an industrial education facility.

No one has summers off. Teachers do. If they choose to work other jobs or not in the summer, that has nothing to do with their salary being paid for nine months work, regardless of whether or not their employers spread it over 12 months for tax purposes.

And it's not just summers. In New Jersey, one of the more oppressively regulated states, school is required to go 180 days a year. That's LESS THAN HALF the days in a year. NO ONE has an office or store or place of business open less than half the year, without being forced to admit their job is part-time or seasonal. It's not just "summers off". They get three day weekends every time you turn around, they have professional development days, where they get paid, but the general public getting taxed involuntarily for their services does not get the benefit, because the kids are off, neither learning, nor being babysat (which is really all that teachers do, when you get down to it - education happens because of the student and/or his parents; teachers are just there because you can't leave children alone). There are four to five day weekends for Thanksgiving, over a week for Christmas (with numerous hours of so-called school days given over to preparatory celebrations and social nonsense), a week for spring break/Easter vacation (some schools have both) and so on. And there is NEVER school on weekends, so that's an ironclad limit that many other professions don't have. Even if the teachers go in on weekends, that's their own fault. It's their unions running the place, it's their policies which try to justify their existence with stuff like that, but they are definitely not providing their public services on weekends and other days off.

Absolutely no other profession tells their customers "Pay us even when we're not serving you" over and above vacations and such (which teachers get as well).

"A man who knows a subject thoroughly...can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy." - HL Mencken

Those are rules established by teachers' unions to exclude non-members from the profession, to make it harder for outsiders to cut into the cartel's business, and they get paid to do it!

EVERYONE has to keep up their educations and knowledge in field, but almost no one, outside of government employees, keeps getting paid after they retire, in addition to social security and generous benefits packages, and taking to the streets in outrage at suggestions that they maybe start contributing as much to their benefits as normal people do. Very few people get paid to keep up their education, either, unless they have have government employee unions shilling for them.
"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." - typical teacher's union rep.

My sister-in-law's father was repeatedly elected to an office in his teacher's union, and in his last election ran on the slogan "two weeks paid" based on his track record of negotiating that sentence for teachers subjected to discipline.

THE TEACHERS are the ones who benefit from that! It's like complaining about the poor doctors who have to keep up their immunizations. Lots of people would LOVE to have the luxury of going to school just to keep up their knowledge of a subject in which they had an interest. Most of use, however, have to earn a living, working later than school teachers, without summers off.

You're SERIOUSLY bitching that teachers have to learn? If learning is such a hardship that it counts as a major issue in assessing a job's difficulty, THAT IS ON THE TEACHING PROFESSION! You are COMPLAINING about teachers having to go through what they put everyone else!

"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency." - HL Mencken

Because nobody values anything that is free or even cheap. There are graduation ceremonies for grade school and kindergarten. It is considered a praiseworthy accomplishment to finish what you are compelled to do by law. The dillution of higher education and the complete and total collapse of discipline and order on campuses has made "higher education" into an experience that adds little to the capabilities of the person who undergoes it, while in practice, serving as an extension of juvenility and adolescent mentalities. It is openly promoted as a time of self-indulgence & wilful disregard of standards of prudence, propriety and temperance in the pursuit of self-destructive hedonism. The educations offered have become a joke, with many, many courses and even majors aimed at the sort of pointless and academic rhetoric as in the original article that does no good to any person attempting to improve their capacity to make their way in the world. It's not an accident that the secondary meaning of the word "academic" is "irrelevant".

The original article is an example of exactly the problem, because it is the education establishment that allows this woman to not only spend other peoples' money in pursuit of this nonsense, but to promulgate it to a captive audience.
And you seeing nothing wrong with using the phrase "taught critical thinking" is symptomatic of a population that has been conditioned to control.

"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens." - Mencken again. When you're right, you're right.