You are thinking of this too narrowly . . . there are two questions you need to ask:
1. "what is the average teacher's salary, and what is the average hockey players salary?"
2. "Then, why do we pay the best hockey players $1 million per year, but the best teachers the same as the worst?"1. There are about 1.1 million hockey players in North America. Total NHL payroll in 2012 was about $1.8 billion. The average North American hockey player is paid about $1,600 each. Mind you, there are about 1.1 million paid $0 and a few hundred paid in the millions, but, the average hockey player salary is quite low. I'm not even going to try to put any accuracy to the 'average' teacher's salary, I understand there are all sorts of grids and the such. But, to pick a number, let's say it's $60,000. So, the average teacher in BC makes 37.5x more than the average hockey player.
2. We pay the best hockey players more because, well, it's a merit based system in an open market. They put bums in the seats, sell TV ads, sell jerseys, etc…. they then create a whole lot of jobs for other people. Nobody would pay $200 a ticket to watch an 'average' hockey player.
If teachers worked on a merit based system, an argument could be made to pay the best teachers a lot more and the worst teachers much less. In fact, there is nothing stopping a private school from paying a teacher $1 million, so long as the student's parents see value in it. If they want to hire Stephen Hawking, pay him millions and charge crazy high tuition, they certainly can.
Your point was well intended, but much too narrow of a focus. You were comparing the 'top performing hockey players' against the 'average teacher'. You had to compare the average to the average.
I realize it was a simplistic comparison, I was merely attempting to point out the imbalance in "wages" in 2 scenarios of society wants and needs. Given the choice most people would acknowledge that teachers/doctors et al deserve to make more than anyone playing a game for a living. In alot of cases we demand government run our industries of "need" like teaching, medical, energy, water utilities etc in order to maintain low cost by removing the profit factor for the greater good of society. Meanwhile our "wants" costs are allowed to spiral out of control.
I think a society that has the ability to spend billions of dollars for sports and entertainment has funding for our needs but it's a matter of priorities.
You could apply your same logic to teachers pay as well. There are people providing others with different forms of learning in all sorts of environments free of charge. If you took all forms of income from education and divided by the number of educators (tutors etc) the "wage" numbers would be very low.