Teachers were more appreciated and valued by society in the past than they were nowadays.

TOEFL Writing Topic: Teachers were more appreciated and valued by society in the past than they were nowadays.

Thanks to the development of advanced information technology, now people can get the latest information and knowledge from the internet. Students can take courses online so that they do not have to go to school. It is an inevitable trend that teachers are less appreciated and valued by society at the present than they were in the past.

In the past, fewer paths existed for people to accept education and acquire information, and teachers always knew better. Yet nowadays we have a variety of resources to acquire knowledge from specific fields. We can google our questions on Wikipedia and take courses on K12 website. Some famous professors recorded their teaching videos and uploaded them to the Internet. If you want to learn from someone, you can search and find the best course in certain areas. It means now we can learn from the best humankind but not stick to one teacher as we used to do. Therefore, the value of the teacher as a job gradually declined, because now we are less likely to appreciate our teachers as a whole. We now tend to value the most famous and scholar-like teachers.

In a developing country like mine, students used to see teachers as their fate changers. Due to the increasingly spread-out Internet construction, teachers become a sort of resource of knowledge, but not the only resource. Besides, the information in the textbook cannot catch up with the pace of change in this world. In the past, the world is in a more stable situation. Teachers’ words seem to be truth at least for half of a generation. However, things become different recently, as no one can be sure that present common sense will not be proved wrong in the near future.

Based on the reasons stated above, I agree that teacher are less appreciated and valued by society than they were in the past. After all, the time has changed now.