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 I think all of what you write here is seriously real and true, and makes what I said in class seem far too simple. I think you're right to point out that a quality education is not reducible to money: there's no direct relationship between how much money a teacher makes and how good of a teacher he or she is, and it's completely possible to have a wonderful school experience in an underfunded school district, or with an underpaid teacher. The only point that I was trying to make, which I still think is true but probably not nearly as important as I was making it out to be, is that it seems like we ("the public," or the news media, or etc.)  concentrate time and energy and attention on where our tax money is being spent. If we allocate substantially more money (way, way more money) on our education, I think that there's a chance we might begin to take education really seriously as a value, as something worth making high quality and accessible.

It's pretty transparently cynical of me, and maybe lazy too, to appeal immediately to our baser instincts – ideally, it be nice if people just "cared about the things that matter," rather than having to have some kind of material incentive. But I also think there's a good chance here to use some of the things that I've learned about the brain to make a less cynical, less reductive claim. It's probably not true that people simply always do things for money, or that money is somehow inherently worth doing, and our brains are hard-wired to stay focused always on making money. The brain, as we've learned, is a system that flexibly and adaptably handles inputs and outputs. It seems reasonable to imagine that there is or could be a way to reconfigure the relationship between conceptual inputs and outputs – we're not stuck with a system that demands that money have a high value. So then the question is how exactly to affect those changes, which is something I think we could explore in class, if we want to.