I wanted to be an electrical engineer, then I saw all the math and settled for electrician, then I saw all the math and settled for Janitor

It's also possible that these aren't all of the available answers and they only selected the ones they thought are interesting.

It says all the children were given an option to pick up to 3 answers. Given the small sample size, it's likely there were questioned by the same person and that person didn't convey that to children properly.

Or they are all very focused on only 1 path.

You need to give yourself more credit. You didn't become a failure, it was within you the whole time; you were always a failure...

That concludes my Pep Talk®

We know more about our solar system than our oceans. We might have mapped a bit of the floor, but we don't know what is between the surface and the ocean floor.

Thwn I'd expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.

I wonder if kids pick that because its one job that they understand and attribute positively (to some degree - "a teacher is someone that teaches kids like me at a school and we have fun") whereas jobs that their parents have are more nebulous and more negative in their mind ("my parents leave for the day and then come back angry? I don't want to do that").

I know a former teacher in China who told me that it's a very respected profession there, in the same way that doctors and lawyers are respected in the west.

I knew lots of kids who wanted to be teachers. Ask a kid that age to list their favorite people and their teacher will pop up often, because it’s someone they know. Teaching is something tangible to them.

I also knew several adults who wanted to be a teacher, but quit shortly after starting because they literally couldn’t afford it due to unreasonably low wages. We should really treat good teachers better.

A lot more children from developing countries tend to want to be teachers because education is not taken for granted there (even when it has been universally available for a couple generations like it is now in China, the times in which it was not are still in living memory...go back to the 1960s and 70s and you still had many people in especially rural China who had very low levels of education). Education is seen there as a noble profession helping people on the path to a better life, and they look at teachers not too differently from how they look at doctors.

By contrast, developed countries tend to take education for granted, and young people see that education is not really that necessary to become rich, powerful and famous, and the most glamorized people in the society tend to be either some kind of entertainer, sports or pop star, or rich entrepreneurs.

This might be a hot take, but I think it started with tying internet identities to real identities.

Unless I misunderstand, in China it's illegal to distribute VPNs, but simply using one and accessing the wider net is fine. That implementation isn't great, but it could also be a lot worse. Effectively it means anyone who's tech savvy enough can leave the walled garden whenever they like with practically no consequence. Though, it still requires some group of people assume the legal risk of setting up and hosting the VPN infrastructure.

I feel like there must be some means of achieving the same effect without criminalizing people just for providing a service. Like, defaulting to a garden of public and private webpages that meat the standard, but still with some means of leaving that garden provided you pass a minor techincal barrier to entry.

Also forcing every social media site and glorified-website-app to default to chronological sort every time you close the browser tab or leave the app. It's a simple change, but it would do a lot.

For teachers, I guess they're the biggest figure for students as they grow up. Confucian culture emphasizes enormous respect, and tbf, conformity to teachers.

I grew up wanting to be a YouTuber, and now work as a professor somewhere in East Asia with deep Confucian influence. The teacher-student dynamics here is truly shit.

For sure, their space program feats and plans are incredibly exciting, and things we might see in our lifetime. There's a hopeful star-trek-esque optimism about space rn.

I'm not sure about teachers salaries, I'd have to look it up, but I do know teachers are well respected societally.

Not China but in my country teachers would often get benefits like how US soldiers do.

So for example some apartments had reduced rent and most private schools would accept your children for free and pay off lunch, clubs, school trip fees, etc.

So even tho teachers weren't rich they weren't completely on their own either. Maybe a similar thing happens over there?

There is quite literal Opium War going right now (and for few decades in the past) but China has nothing to do with it, it's waged by the US government against people of US and some other countries mostly in Central and South America.