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By highly educated do you mean bachelor's degrees? I think few have more than that, and there are also many who are allowed to teach while working towards their bachelor's. My guess is that that "do something else" for most women is to become a stay at home mother, possibly retaining a part-time job.
And yeah, the state of education is abysmal. The good teachers try to work around the relevant laws. For instance, when a severely disabled kid is throwing a tantrum, teachers aren't allowed to intervene, even if the tantrum involves throwing around and destroying expensive equipment. Idk about whether the same rules apply to regular kids. However, teachers CAN intervene if the tantrum is threatening someone else. So they stand in front of the expensive equipment, wait for the kid to throw a swing as they inevitably will, and then restrain them. Resource teachers have strict limits regarding how many support minutes they give to students who need them, and their workarounds for dealing with these incredible regulations are absurd and often hilarious.
At its core I think it comes down to something very simple. We are outsourcing parenthood, but not trusting the government-provided parents to do their job. Parents need to be able to discipline kids and teach them morality. Giving teachers such an enormous role in kids' lives, without the ability to discipline or support any coherent worldview besides enlightened secular centrism, is doomed from the start. Of course, giving unrelated government employees a parenting role is doomed from the start anyways, so I don't want to give them even more power over kids--just pointing out the inherent contradiction in our approach.
Pedantic answer: Only a minority of American's have bachelors so, by default, a four year not-online bachelors degree is highly educated. However, I AM the asshole for saying that so ...
Anecedotally ... there's a trend of women doing an immediate masters in education / social something something right after undergrad, mostly as a way to continue to delay adulthood. They stack this again with a delay into adulthood by teaching and then, yes you are 100% right, plop into adulthood by getting married. I see it as a way to save professional / feminist face (I have a masters degree and was an educator!) while covertly pursuing a more traditional family arrangement that they may have wanted all along.
Regarding Government-As-Parent .... the antecedent for Teachers-As-Parents was welfare. It's tricky. I'm not a crypto-libertarian-social-darwinist that says let single mothers fend for themselves ... but the OVERWHELMING incentives to abandon the nuclear family have wreaked havoc on everyone, most especially the children of the lower middle class. Even the middle to-upper middle class essentially pay for surrogate or auxiliary parentage in the form of nannies, afterschool programs, and summer camps. This is because fighting for the limbo of a Dual Income Household necessitates both parents spend most of their time (and close to all of their energy) in competitive careers.
For sure. We didn't always need dual income households to feel successful. My wife (a teacher) has quite a few coworkers who pay for childcare only $3-4/hr cheaper than what they themselves make. After taxes, gas costs, etc. they are pretty much paying money to look like teachers rather than mothers. And sure, maybe they're just financially illiterate, but it still raises the question of why they felt like the default should be working rather than parenting.
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Well I think there is some disagreement on whether we should be outsourcing parenthood at all. The group that thinks it's a good idea and the group that distrusts the government provided parents are not composed of the same people but because we've allowed so much centralization we can't seem to conceive of having different systems for these groups.
Well, I agree that it would be nice to have separate systems, but I'm not sure such a clear dichotomy exists. I think most people both think it's a good idea and somewhat distrust the teachers, with a large minority both liking the idea and trusting the teachers, and a much smaller minority disliking school and distrusting the teachers. There's a reason that among those who support school (most people) most still want restrictions on what teachers teach--they're not allowed to teach their religion, or their politics, or generally provide their own viewpoint on anything divisive. That group clearly trusts teachers less than parents, but also still wants their kids spending more time with teachers than with parents.
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