Education Quote by Peter Brimelow

“I think good teachers are underpaid” is a deliberately modest sentence that smuggles a moral judgment into a pocket-sized package. The hedge - “I think” - performs civility and reasonableness, as if the claim were merely one opinion among many. But the real work happens in the adjective “good.” It invites instant agreement while quietly setting up a sorting mechanism: we’re not talking about teachers as a class, we’re talking about the deserving ones. That distinction is politically useful because it flatters the speaker’s fairness (not a blanket defense of public spending) and primes the audience for a second, usually unspoken move: if good teachers are underpaid, then bad teachers are overprotected, overpaid, or both. The line can be a prelude to reform talk - merit pay, testing, union constraints - as much as it can be a straightforward pro-labor sentiment.

Brimelow’s context matters because he’s a journalist known less for education policy than for culture-war framing. In that ecosystem, “teachers” are rarely just workers; they’re proxies for institutions that shape national identity, civic norms, and what children are taught to value. Praising “good teachers” can read as an attempt to claim admiration for the ideal while leaving room to criticize the system that produces (or allegedly fails) them.

The intent is classic rhetorical judo: endorse a widely popular figure (the dedicated teacher) to gain credibility, then use that credibility to argue about budgets, accountability, or institutional power without sounding anti-teacher.