I realized teachers were mediocre idiots when we did presentations on the periodic table. I got aluminum. When I gave my presentation, I mentioned that the British pronunciation & spelling for aluminum was "aluminium." My teacher made a big show of telling me that I must have gotten it wrong. Natually, the class found this amusing and I felt very awkward for a moment. But, feeling put on the spot, I asked to look it up on the classroom computer. She used the Encyclopedia Britannica software or whatever it was we had, and there it was, right there. I'm lucky she didn't tell my parents to put me on prescription meth as punishment, and to her credit, she actually did apologize. But after that, every time I saw a teacher fumble for the answer key or push back on a student in an embarrassing way, I would think of that moment and back up the student, who would turn out to be right more often than not. I guess, in a way, you could say that this "built character" in that I learned early in life that people love to be confidently wrong and that most people shouldn't be taken at face value. Just because someone is in a position of "authority" or "prestige" doesn't mean they deserve to be there, especially not in a system like ours that lets ~100 IQ people serve as "educators." Still, I can only assume that people who vehemently defend public school must not have ever had experiences like these, themselves having been along for the ride with little opportunity for independent thought or revelations that they were smarter than their teachers.
