The current way we live life prevents people from doing things they're best at and would enjoy more to pursue careers simply for better financial reasons. There's no reason people with good teaching skills should be pushed away from teaching(or any other career example) because of financial reasons.
People doing what they enjoy will make them infinitely happier than people who get a lot of money doing something just to impress others.
I'm sure if scientists focused on solar energy and stopped focusing on things to kill the rest of the world, solar energy would become a lot cheaper. Besides if it's mass produced, the cost of making solar panels would decrease per each panel. Oil is cheaper now because they already have the equipment made to mass produce it.
Since when did this argument get personal?
I might be the best ditch digger in the world, but that doesn't mean I should go into ditch digging. One, other people are likely to be almost as good as I am at ditch digging. And two, I am relatively good at a lot of other things that are more valued by society.
The same applies to teaching. Teachers have lowish salaries because there is a large supply of teachers. The truly super smart people who would be great teachers go into business or engineering or some other field that is more difficult to enter and thus has fewer capable workers. Basically those people are more valuable to society in these jobs, even though they would surely be great teachers. Because good engineers are more scarce than teachers, engineers command a higher salary, and the super smart people have a (financial) incentive to go into engineering. Overall these people will choose whichever opportunity they prefer, whether it is teaching at a low salary or some other job at a higher salary.
Of course it is entirely possible that teachers have relatively low salaries because of the government monopoly on education, where there isn't as much competition for good teachers between schools. I'd have to look at some statistics about private school salaries and so forth to say for sure though.
And I agree 100% with moving people away from making weapons and into making other technology that will actually improve (rather than destroy) human life. Just note that if we start to run out of oil, it's price will go up and other technologies like solar energy will become more attractive.
