BC Teachers have voted 87% to escalate the strike...

[Feanor]

I might have more to say later but right now I'm going to comment on the seniority thing.

In principle it would be nice to promote people on the basis of pure merit, but is this undermined by seniority or is it encouraged by seniority?? Older workers are usually experience and hard-working. But older workers often face discrimination on account of their age.

It could also be argued that older workers are resistant to change, refusing to accept new methods of teaching and exhibiting an apprehension toward adopting technology.
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Actually this alleged "apprehension" on the part of older workers has become part of the prejudice. I don't know about teaching, 'Sticks, but I can observe that in my profession older workers were no less adaptive or interested in change than the younger ones.

Personally as a business systems analyst I was continuously an agent of change and certainly had no fear of it. Business systems analyst is a job that resides between the users of systems and the technical architects and programmers who construct the systems. I noticed that, if anything, the older analysts are better agents of change because they tend to have a better understanding of the needs & desires of the systems user than younger analysts who are often obsessed with the technological aspects.