Seven countries, seven high school teachers. What can be learned from looking at these seven lives, both individually and in comparison to one another? In certain basic ways, all seven of the teachers profiled here have much in common: all are performing recognizably similar work. They go to school each day. They receive payment for their labor. They teach in classrooms with desks and chairs. Though some of their schools are unheated while others are beautifully appointed, though some are lecturers while others see their role as facilitators of student-centered pedagogies, they all speak about their teaching in similar ways. All seven feel their work is important, and all seven would choose teaching again, despite the hardships and deprivations that often accompany their labor.
Apart from these fundamental similarities, however, the lives of teachers differed dramatically across this study. Salaries varied widely, relative to both the standard of living and the wages of other professions. Cultural perceptions of teaching itself also differed widely. As I will discuss, this study underscores the extent to which different countries perceive the profession differently. These differences are not all measured in compensation or resources, and some are difficult to measure empirically. But conversations with practitioners in each country make clear an ineffable felt sense of high or low value by the society. And in every case, that sense of cultural value, the “status” of teaching, had an impact on how the teacher perceived his or her work.
Studying the lives of teachers also led me to certain core understandings about the nature of good teaching, worldwide. The first is that the people charged with teaching children must be both intelligent and well educated. As I will discuss in more detail, countries differed considerably in their expectations for the intellectual quality of their teachers. Teacher education also varied widely from one country to another. Perhaps it is no surprise that in those places where entry was selective and training was rigorous, teaching as a profession was respected and students performed well on international measures of knowledge and skills. The second understanding is equally important: once hired, retaining good teachers requires that schools be places where smart individuals are willing to work over the course of decades, that schools be clean and safe, that administrators afford practitioners a modicum of power and authority over their practice, that salaries be high enough to allow teachers some leisure to think and grow. As I will argue, in every country, wealthy or poor, implementing these reforms is not beyond the realm of possibility. In many cases – following the lead of those places where teaching is a thriving occupation – such reforms would simply mean shifting priorities and redistributing existing resources, changing the language we use to speak about teachers and the kind of authority over their practice we are willing to afford them.
The Various Meanings of Prestige
One of the most dramatic differences across these seven countries concerns the level of social prestige afforded to the work of teachers. Sociologists, both in the United States and abroad, have long grappled with the question of professional status and the elusive traits that define prestige within a given culture or a given profession. Research on teaching underscores those differences and complications. Cultures nurture lessons in citizenry that run so deep it is sometimes difficult to distinguish learned traits and beliefs from nature itself. Many Asian countries, for example, place a deep cultural value on their senior citizens. Notions of privacy and private property differ from culture to culture. When dramatic cultural changes do occur, as they did in Finland with regard to the teaching profession, the transformation seems almost magical, prompting other cultures to assume that those reforms cannot be replicated in their own countries. At the end of this chapter, I will speak about this idea of cultural transformation, considering some earlier movements such as environmentalism that gradually gained traction, prompting lasting changes in attitudes and behaviors.
In considering the global differences in teacher prestige, I begin with a list of qualities that economists and social scientists have used to define occupational status. In his essay “Class, Status and Party,” Max Weber defined status as grounded in three essential factors: property, political power, and prestige. Property is wealth, the possession of material assets. Power is the ability to do what one wants and to impose one’s will on others, notably through political influence. Prestige, he argued, can be granted without wealth or property, through the stature associated with possessing special knowledge.1 For teachers in America, Weber’s categories have some obvious corollaries. Property for teachers might refer to the special material benefits of the work, tenure and guaranteed pensions being the most explicitly positive forms of status. Political power, in the case of teachers, might be seen to most clearly derive from union membership and the lobbying arm of the profession, arguably a historically potent force for teachers.
Weber’s definition of prestige, however, linked as it is to “specialized knowledge,” has long eluded the American teacher. This is true for a number of reasons. The first concerns our culture’s attitude toward children and their relative place in the social hierarchy. The second has to do with the historical place of book-learning within the culture. Of the two forms of specialized knowledge associated with teaching (work with children/work with books), it is the reverence for the book, I would argue, that has been crucial to a culture’s respect for the profession. In America, work associated with children has historically garnered low pay and low status, most dramatically so in those jobs where it is accompanied by the perception of no necessary attendant book-learning: nannies and child care workers in the United States earn less than locker room attendants, pedicurists, and housecleaners.2 Early childhood education has long struggled for legitimacy and even a modicum of respect within a larger profession that itself struggles for prestige.
The low status of teaching in America can be traced, however, not only to these attitudes about children, but also to our attitudes about book-learning. Richard Hofstadter, in his Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1966), authored one of the earlier surveys of this phenomenon, laying out the historical roots of America’s resistance to the book. American democracy evolved, he argued, in a way that served to undercut the value of intellectualism. Utilitarianism, evangelical Protestantism, and capitalism all devalued bookishness and celebrated traits of character that precluded deep learning.3 We see evidence of this anti-intellectual impulse in the earliest nineteenth-century popular culture, and even in the choice of heroic figures – the Paul Bunyons and Horatio Algers – that the culture chose to glorify. That suspicion of book-learning persists today, deeply engrained in the American character and leaving the country susceptible, some have argued, to demagoguery.4
Around the world, there is no equivalent to this American suspicion of book-learning. Indeed, in a country such as France, the historically high status of teachers may be connected to that culture’s long-standing view of itself as a nation of readers, a country that has valued debate and intellectual engagement as a core value. In Eastern European countries, especially before the fall of communism, teachers were venerated for their learning. In developing countries in Africa and Asia, education alone has marked individuals as worthy of status, regardless of their income. India, which is itself in the process of changing, has long held the intellectual and spiritual wisdom of teachers as a marker for status. Sociologists have noted that the attitudes, values, and expectations associated with the teacher in India are embodied by the word “guru,” a 2,500-year-old Sanskrit term with a broad spectrum of meanings – from teacher to spiritual guide to mentor. At the basis of all these terms is the notion of deep learning.
As globalization flattens differences, Western capitalist values seem to seep into every country, undercutting the intellectual reputation of teaching. This is happening on a number of fronts. Teacher education across the world is, with only a few exceptions, being watered down or altogether eliminated, reinforcing the notion that scholarship is not crucial to the work of teaching. Fewer students than ever are interested in majoring in the humanities, reinforcing the low-level skills of those who choose to teach in those areas. Students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, a burgeoning cohort, are even less likely to choose teaching. In Azerbaijan and Chile, I was hard-pressed to find a single young science lover who would even consider a career in the field. Economics, engineering, technology work, and other STEM fields have held almost universal interest for young people. In emerging economies, where money, understandably, is a primary first concern, low wages and low prestige are fatal disincentives.
For the first time in decades, the subject of teacher shortages has reemerged in the news. In the last year, American newspapers have been filled with articles warning of new and massive vacancies around the country. Unfriendly teacher policies in states like Kansas and Wisconsin have meant an exodus of professionals from those states.5 In August 2015, a New York Times story, entitled “Why Teachers Can’t Hotfoot It out of Kansas Fast Enough,” laid out in microcosm the ongoing dilemma for American education. According to the article, Kansas is facing “a substantial shortage expected only to get much worse.” Pay for Kansas teachers is lower than the pay in all but seven states (“though not by much in most of them.”), job protections have been cut by lawmakers, collective bargaining has been reduced, schools are chronically underfunded, and several of the largest districts have been given permission to hire unlicensed teachers. Days later, another statistic came out of California, stating that districts there have to fill 21,500 classroom positions statewide, while the state is issuing fewer than 15,000 new teaching credentials a year. In all states, veteran teachers who waited for the economy to recover before leaving their positions are now exiting in large numbers. At the same time, fewer students are willing to enroll in certification programs. In states like California and Indiana, dramatic reductions in enrollments for teacher licensure programs signal the beginning of an ongoing problem.6
Internationally, the problem is even more acute. Projections made by the U.N. Millennium Project identified recent teacher shortages as one of the primary stumbling blocks in attaining the goal of universal primary education. Teacher shortages have emerged in every area of the globe, from Western Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa. The cause for these shortages differs from country to country. In Arab states and in Africa, the paucity of educated young people, the sociocultural impediments to female employment, unstable policies for improving teacher education, and declining salaries are major contributing factors. In Western Europe and South and Western Asia, the reasons for teacher shortages are like those in the United States: impending surges in retirements, unattractive working conditions, low professional appeal, and low compensation.7 In 2012, a UNESCO study reported that in the next year, 1.7 million new teaching posts would be open worldwide, and many countries would not come close to meeting those needs.8
What, then, can countries do to reinvigorate interest in the field? What traits and practices seem to correct some of the deep problems and prejudices associated with the profession? In the following pages, I identify three aspects of the profession that seem to impact prestige and status in the most overt ways. These include (1) the relative ease or difficulty of professional entry, (2) the question of salary, and (3) the kind of authority invested in the teacher by the culture in which he or she is practicing. Together, these traits of teaching seem to correlate with the quality of those who choose the profession and the capacity of schools to retain those people over time.
Difficult Professional Entry and the Status of Teacher Education
Unsurprisingly, in all seven countries I visited, the prestige of teaching correlated with the competitiveness of obtaining a position as a teacher and the rigor of preparation. Where teaching was most venerated – in Finland and Taiwan – open positions were scarce and highly coveted. Turnover was rare; entry was difficult. These were also countries where teacher education – the gateway into teaching – was considered serious work, where apprenticeships were long, and where faculty spoke about their training as demanding and intellectually rigorous.
As it does with so many other aspects of the profession, the United States falls in the middle of the pack worldwide, in terms of the rigor of teacher preparation and professional entry. In terms of teacher training, our country has historically set a fairly low bar. Entrance into teacher preparation programs is easy, and consequently, the quality of those enrolling in such programs tends to be low, relative to other undergraduate majors and graduate programs. It is hard to say which came first in the United States – low quality or low prestige – but a historical consideration of the study of education suggests that, from the start, the discipline had a difficult time situating itself in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century academy. As a latecomer to the standard fields studied in higher education, teacher education was considered the poor cousin of all academic departments. Arguably the first interdisciplinary field, education lacked the focused, specialized, and rarified traits of most disciplines. Here was a course of study that included psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history. Because the field, from the start, was so radically interdisciplinary, it left itself open to critics who argued that there was no discrete and undisputed body of knowledge necessary for the practice of teaching, a fact that has made the field vulnerable to accusations of charlatanism. To this day, many of the most prestigious colleges and universities in America either do not have a department of education at all or, if they do, do not allow their students to major in that subject. This includes some of the country’s most famous women’s colleges where teacher training, in the mid-twentieth century, was seen to undermine efforts to present themselves as equal to elite men’s colleges. At Smith College, for example, teacher education has held an uneasy place in the curriculum, moving from the department of philosophy to psychology to its own discrete department only after World War II, when coursework could focus on statistics, measurement, and testing. Indeed, today’s aspiring teachers at Smith, as in all Massachusetts colleges and universities, are prohibited from majoring in education. A statewide law to this effect was intended to raise the intellectual preparation of incoming teachers. Preliminary certification in Massachusetts, sufficient to assume a full-time classroom position, is possible with nothing but a general test of content knowledge.9
Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond has written extensively on the causes and effects of this low status of teacher preparation. A fierce advocate of professional training, Darling-Hammond has argued for the exceptional complexity of the work. The long list of necessary skills and understandings, wrote Darling-Hammond, includes:
… how people learn and how to teach effectively, including aspects of pedagogical content knowledge that incorporate language, culture, and community contexts for learning. Teachers also need to understand the person, the spirit, of every child and find a way to nurture that spirit. And they need the skills to construct and manage classroom activities efficiently, communicate well, use technology, and reflect on their practice to learn from and improve it continually … Teachers need not only to be able to keep order and provide useful information to students but also to be increasingly effective in enabling a diverse group of students to learn ever more complex material. In previous decades, they were expected to prepare only a small minority for ambitious intellectual work, whereas they are now expected to prepare virtually all students for higher order thinking and performance skills once reserved to only a few.10
Compounding that difficult set of required stills is the demographic complexity of the classroom. In the United States, 21 percent of public school children live in poverty; 35 percent have diagnosed learning issues; over 9 percent are designated as English language learners, and over 49 percent are members of a racial or ethnic “minority,” many of them recent immigrants from cultures that teachers need to understand.11 The haphazard preparation of many teachers, Darling-Hammond argued, is not evidence that teacher education is not necessary. On the contrary, the constant criticism of teachers suggests that preparation needs to be improved. Darling-Hammond pointed to these expectations for knowledge as evidence that teacher education is crucial and that it requires a level of rigor that is equivalent to the preparation required of other professions, like lawyers and doctors. Indeed, Darling-Hammond’s recommendations for reforming teacher education sound a good deal like medical school training. Like medical education, teacher preparation should require a difficult and highly competitive application process, including interviews; classes that offer training in the specialized skills and knowledge of the profession, combining conventional classroom work with “rotations” into real-life settings; and professional development schools staffed with master teachers who can articulate their craft to novices. Like medical education, teacher education should draw on a changing body of knowledge, developed from ongoing research, increasingly sophisticated, and quickly integrated into the curriculum. Today, medical education requires a thorough and exhausting education for a field that cannot be entered into on whim and one that dissuades attrition, if only because of the monetary and time investment the student has made. While teacher education may necessarily be shorter and less costly, it should be no less rigorous and intellectually challenging.
Looking globally, then, it is not surprising that in countries where teaching is a prestigious occupation, entry into teacher education programs is difficult. Finland famously claims that it is harder to get into a teacher training program than it is to get into medical school. Finland selects candidates from the very top of their graduating classes, then requires rigorous and intellectually difficult preparation, including the requirement of a research-based master’s degree and extended fieldwork. Taiwan similarly sorts its candidates, accepting only 15 percent of applicants and then requiring complicated career trajectories into full-time employment.
In countries such as France and Chile, recent reforms have moved in an opposite direction, making professional entry easier and more streamlined. In Chile, a long-standing, five-year program for teacher licensure has now been replaced with a standard four-year bachelor’s degree. In France, teachers can now be assigned classes outside their area of expertise. Both Mauricio and Laurence noted these changes as symptomatic of a general devaluing of the profession, a sense that the trait of specialized knowledge necessary for professional status was eroding. Perhaps the most dramatic example of easy entry was Vasso’s experience in Greece, where she and her colleagues received only minimal preparation, virtually no internship experience, and a system of job placement that was haphazard at best.
Without changes in the real and perceived rigor of teacher education, the field has made itself vulnerable to criticism on several fronts. First, there is the sense that teaching is easy work, that anyone can do it, and that, therefore, it is due little respect or support. Second, there is the assumption that the field can be saved by short-term alternative programs designed to drop smart young people into classrooms and then lift them out again in two or three years. The burgeoning of these easy-entry programs, starting the 1990s, has done a great disservice to the profession worldwide. In such low esteem is teacher education that programs such as Teach for America (TFA) advertise informally that students already certified are less likely to be chosen. Whether true or not, at Smith word has circulated that a student’s chances of being selected for TFA improve if she has no coursework in education whatsoever.
In most countries I visited, the content and curriculum of teacher pedagogy coursework was criticized. A majority of the teachers with whom I spoke could not recall the details of what they learned, referring vaguely to some concepts in psychology and methods. Finland and Taiwan were exceptions. Annukka could explain in great detail the work she had done in preparation for teaching, and her interest in the art and science of pedagogy was reinforced by the fact that she herself was charged with generating curricula and writing textbooks. The knowledge gained in her teacher education classes, in other words, was used by Annukka in her daily work. It had become a key part of what allowed her to perform effectively. Teachers in Annukka’s school sat together and spoke about their daily strategies for covering the material. They collaborated in generating content for classes and made constant connections between what they had taught and how students responded to the material. Teacher education was crucial, in other words, to a teacher’s survival in the field. Lessons learned in the university became a scaffold for solving new problems.
Though Feng-juan in Taiwan tended to work in greater isolation than Annukka in Finland, she, too, spoke with respect and good feeling about her preparation. Feng-juan came into the field just as teacher education was changing in Taiwan. A new Teacher Education Act, after the fall of the Nationalist regime,12 expanded the number of schools with teacher preparation programs while still managing to retain the best students and faculty that had given these institutions historical clout. Taiwan scholars attributed the high standards to a kind of cause and effect: “The ability of these programs to admit academically able students has made it possible to attract scholars from prestigious universities to become teacher educators at the university level. These faculty are in general able to provide quality teacher training for their students and to advance academic research in the field of education.”13
In France, a different kind of teacher preparation was one factor influencing the historical prestige of high school teaching. There, high school teachers have needed exceptionally thorough subject knowledge in order to qualify for a place in a French lycée. If pedagogy was not stressed, knowledge in the field was crucial. Still, today, all French high school teachers must pass the challenging CAPES (certificat d’aptitude au professorat de l’enseignement du second degré) exam.14 Job placement in France is then based on a point system, in which experience and success gradually accrue on a teacher’s way to the more coveted geographic regions, such as Paris. Because of Laurence’s particular placement in the classes préparatoires, her preparation was especially rigorous. Such teachers are required to pass a second exam, called the agrégation. First introduced in 1766, the “agre” is notoriously difficult, reserved for “the crème de la crème” of French teaching candidates. Open only to applicants holding master’s degrees or above, the agrégation takes a full additional year of preparation at the university. The exam generally consists of a preliminary written part where most candidates are eliminated, followed by an oral part where the candidate must demonstrate the ability to prepare and give lessons on just about any topic within the scope of the discipline. A description of the exam from the French Ministry of Education offers the following details:
In most disciplines, the lessons expected extend well above the secondary education level; indeed, the candidate may even have to present a lesson appropriate for the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th years of specialized studies at university … The agrégation is also used as an unofficial national ranking system for students, giving a fair comparison between students of different universities. This is especially true in the humanities, where the agrégation is highly selective and demonstrates erudition of the candidate. The students of the écoles normales supérieures often give up an entire year of their student life to prepare for any potential question. Generally, less than 10 percent of those taking the exam actually pass.15
The teachers with whom I spoke at Jean Jaurès worried aloud that the recent loosening of entrance requirements for teacher education programs was impacting the prestige of the profession. Those changes sound familiar to American teachers, focused as they are on addressing “student needs” and a call for equity. Instituted by the French Minister of Education Luc Ferry in 2004, the new program has called for a focus “on simple priorities, such as preventing illiteracy” rather than what Ferry called the “accumulation of diverse concerns of varying importance” that “too often destroy the efficiency of training.”16 Words like “efficiency” and a general questioning of the value of rigorous intellectual training have caused alarm among Laurence’s colleagues. They point to recent articles in the French press noting that fewer students are taking the CAPES and agrégation exams, and that, as a result, regional districts are filling vacancies by recruiting outside staff and then paying them less than regular teacher salaries. French teachers feared that this was the first step on a slippery slope of lower standards, to American-like policies of alternative certification and privatization.
Competitive Salaries
No one goes into teaching to be rich. Still, huge differences emerged in the wages of teachers, relative to the cost of living, across the seven countries in this study. Countries with the highest relative wages – Finland, Taiwan, France, and the United States – have lifted the profession into the middle class. In Finland and Taiwan, teachers’ salaries were equivalent to those of other white-collar professionals. Countries with the lowest wages – Azerbaijan, Chile, and Greece – were, predictably, those where education is most problematic. As a consequence, lifestyles differed widely. Annukka owned a second home and collected shoes, while Vasso could barely make her monthly rent, and Gulnaz held three jobs to support her family. Though Mauricio has managed to travel the world, he lives alone, on a shoe-string budget, works two jobs, and gets critical, supplemental income for a variety of ancillary responsibilities and awards.
For centuries, teacher pay has been a sticking point for American communities. Low pay has dogged recruiting since the earliest schools were formed in the United States, and it is universally blamed for the exodus of men from the field once industrialization opened new avenues for employment. In the early nineteenth century, school terms were short, allowing white male teachers to do the work of the classroom as one of many jobs. This changed by the turn of the twentieth century, when educational bureaucratization required new teacher degrees and licenses, making a once-informal system no longer worth the trouble. A 1920 essay in the American School Board Journal described the problem clearly: “The requirements of training for the artisan have increased hardly at all in 75 years; the requirements for the man city teacher have increased many fold. The reward of the teacher has advanced, however, at about the same rate as the reward of the artisan. Relatively, the position of the teacher is much less desirable.”17
Dan Lortie’s 1975 sociological study of the profession uncovered other interesting and telling things about the mostly female American teacher workforce he studied. He found, for example, that psychological rewards were the primary source of motivation for teachers and that the reliance on psychological rewards increases the longer the teacher remains in the field. This is true, undoubtedly, for reasons that have to do with the structure of the profession itself. As Lortie and others have pointed out, teaching was and remains one profession that is both “unstaged” in terms of mobility and “front-loaded” in terms of salary and remuneration. As an unstaged profession, new teachers, arriving in their classrooms for the first time, are charged with exactly the same tasks as those who have been working for thirty years. The only way to vary those tasks – five classes a day, two to three preparations – is to leave classroom teaching altogether; in other words, the only promotion available to teachers is to become administrators. The front-loading of salaries is another entrenched trait of the profession that has its roots in the historically transient nature of the work. Since the feminization of the field, teaching was long perceived as a short-term commitment, a way station for women before marriage and child-rearing. For those unfortunate enough to remain in the field over time – spinsters and widows – the assumption was that few incentives were necessary to keep them there. The fact that they remained meant they had no better options. So it is that teachers’ salaries, though never really competitive with other white-collar professions, are more competitive at the starting point or low end of the scale. Salary increments decrease over time, so that the average American teacher merely doubles her salary over the span of a thirty-five to forty-year career – compared with much more dramatic increases for other white-collar work.18
In general, across the globe, teachers’ salaries are low in comparison to other workers, let alone educated workers. Though the cost of living obviously differs from one country to another, in most countries, teachers earn well below the average national salary.19 Finland, Japan, and Singapore teachers earn the highest salaries; Chile and Greece are among the lowest. Still, salaries today are apparently less potent a factor in determining student interest in teaching than they once were. Young people are susceptible to other incentives, to the conditions of the workplace, hours of work, length of vacations, and other such ancillary benefits that teaching could potentially offer to families. Studies show that given a choice, many young people around the world would forgo higher salaries for improved working conditions and other perks associated with prestige jobs.20 If authority and prestige were present as incentives, the fact of receiving merely a middle-class wage would not thwart a country’s best candidates from spending their lives in classrooms.
Authority, Inside and Outside the Classroom
The concept of authority, as it exists in the world’s classrooms, is also complicated and variable. In the abstract and ideally, the teacher’s role should carry a good measure of professional authority, sufficient to impress parents and to gain compliance from students. But from where does that authority derive? In the countries I visited, a key factor determining status was the degree of authority afforded the classroom teacher, both in the school and in the community. Authority was expressed differently from place to place, and perceptions of authority differed from one individual to another.
Weber distinguished authority from coercion (or pure force) by outlining three categories of “legitimate domination” of an individual over a group: traditional, legal-rational, and charismatic.21 Traditional authority is based on established beliefs and deeply ingrained traditions. An example of this might be the authority of a father, priest, or rabbi. Legal-rational authority is authority whose legitimacy comes from the rules that govern an individual’s appointment to an office. Police officers and corporate presidents hold legal-rational authority in their positions. Charismatic authority was defined by Weber as “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character.” An example of this might be a rock star, a revered athlete, or a guru. Though the position of teacher in the United States has always been culturally fraught, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pedagogues still wielded some degree of traditional and legal-rational authority over their students. Literature, memoirs, and journalistic recollections of American classrooms often showed teachers as paternalistic figures or switch-wielding policemen, who, in either case, inspired tractability and compliance.22 In American schools, however, traditional and legal-rational authority all but disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century. The antiwar and counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s began a process that gradually wrested power away from adults. Timothy Leary’s famous dictum to “Question Authority!” has been emblazoned on bumper stickers and T-shirts ever since, reflecting a deep-seated skepticism of both intellectual and bureaucratic authority that has marked the last years of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first. Wikipedia, crowd-sourcing, YouTube, reality television, and other forms of knowledge-gathering and entertainment are predicated on subverting the myths of authority. Millennials, those born after 1980, are essentially “digital natives,” for whom information is accessible without the conduit of adult authority. What remains, noted the historian Gerald Grant, is only the tentative power that comes from charismatic authority. Student compliance is predicated on the teacher’s ability to win over the class, to charm them or impress them by the force of personality.23 This wholesale shift away from the teacher’s traditional or legal-rational authority makes the job much more difficult, both in practical terms and in terms of personal ego. Young people, especially those engaging in short-term programs like TFA, enter the profession ready to engage their classes based on passion and personality, only to find out how little their students find them charming. Without the successful exertion of charismatic authority, the work becomes stressful and humiliating. There is no sense of impotence quite like that of a teacher who has lost control of his or her classroom.
Historically, other countries have suffered less from this ambivalent relationship of teacher to authority. In Taiwan, as in many Asian countries, teacher authority has been deeply embedded in historical and cultural norms. But its own recent history of colonialization and domination has ironically reinforced those traits. As others have noted, Taiwan’s traditional and legal-rational respect for the teacher comes from a constellation of factors related to its ancient and recent history, much of it under the subjugation of others. From China, under whose rule Taiwan lived since the late seventeenth century, Taiwan appropriated the notion of teacher as both jingshi (learned scholar) and renshi (moral figure). During the period of colonial subjugation by Japan (1895–1945), the status and authority of the teacher was reified. Japan had an enormous influence on Taiwanese society, much of it in ways that Taiwanese themselves acknowledge to be positive. Massive building projects and urban renewal transformed Taiwan under Japanese rule. In education, teacher status was reinforced, since the Japanese tradition of respect for the pedagogue, the sensei, was as powerful as that of the Chinese. What’s more, as colonizers, Japanese teachers were perceived as educationally and culturally elite, a stereotype that added to the prestige of the role. Finally, under the Nationalist regime of the KMT (1949–1993), teacher status was again reinforced as teachers became the crucial players in maintaining the legitimacy of the state.24
In France, Laurence’s authority over her classes préparatoires seemed to derive less from cultural and social imperatives than from the sense of her possessing something that her students genuinely needed: information and skills necessary to pass the arduous concours externe exam and fulfill their career ambitions. While teacher status in France has declined, as it has in other Western European countries, in the rarified atmosphere of the classe prépas, I perceived an almost Asian respect for Laurence. The belief that the teacher possesses something that the students want and need represents a kind of authority that sociologists don’t discuss in terms of the teaching profession. I see this as another category of power altogether, apart from the three defined by Weber. Here, it is a material authority, one that derives from the power of the teacher to offer or withhold critical information that can lead to material benefit. In no class as much as the classe préparatoire is this one-to-one correspondence between teacher and examination so direct and palpable. With the test serving not only as the singular route into the Grandes Écoles, but from there into a life of wealth and power, there was no ambivalence about the importance of the teacher. While her interactions may have been informal and friendly, her authority was absolute and her status was high.
This theory about the relation of authority to status is made complicated in the case of Greece, a country undergoing seismic changes. From the perspective of an outsider looking in, Vasso’s classes showed her little respect. They talked to one another as she taught. They wrote on the desks in full view of their teacher, and in general seemed to flout her authority. Yet Vasso felt herself respected by her students, never once complaining about their behavior or bemoaning the fact that she wielded so little overt power in her own classroom. Vasso’s refusal to chastise her distracted students, her suppression of her own traditional or legal-rational authority over them, ultimately emerged for me as a kind of political act. Given the dire circumstances in which she was working and her own slashed salary, I came to read her attitude as a kind of unspoken form of revolt: “Of course my students are misbehaving,” her actions said. “They are being exploited and oppressed by a corrupt government that has allowed its people to starve. Of course they defaced their desks and the walls of their school; this is a rational response to oppression.” Conventional student/teacher authority had given way to a shared form of daily protest: All of them – students, teachers, and administrators – were in the morass together. Students, powerless to vote or voice their frustration in other ways, chose vandalism and classroom disengagement as their form of push-back; Vasso’s form of protest was to let them do it, and also to vote “no” on austerity in the 2015 elections in Greece, even if it meant leaving the European Union (“I would rather be a poor person than a slave,” she said). The educational philosopher Doris Santoro would have described Vasso’s behavior as an example of what she called the “Cassandra effect,” a kind of “moral madness” that arises when teachers are required to engage in practices, whether pedagogical or curricular, that they believe are immoral or unethical.25 This realization about the power of anarchy as a form of protest reminded me of the urban classrooms described by counterculture theorists during the period of the Vietnam War. Jonathan Kozol’s description of his classes in Death at an Early Age, for example, emerges as an interesting parallel. Confronted by a political agenda larger than his teaching – the social neglect of the urban poor, the corruptions of government – Kozol described his laxity and conscious subversion of rules in his own classroom. In a famous sequence from that book, Kozol ruminated on the ways in which his fellow teachers continued to teach, unquestioningly, in the squalid conditions of their inner-city classrooms. “I had a hard time with the problem of being honest,” he wrote, “of confronting openly the extent to which I was compromised by going along with things that were abhorrent, and by accepting as moderately reasonable or unavoidably troublesome things which, if they were inflicted on children of my own, I would have condemned savagely.” 26
True teacher authority, then, seems to derive from two places. First, it derives from without, where cultures respect the work of teachers and schools, and place value – whether abstract or concrete – on scholarship; and second, from within, where teachers in turn respect the systems that hired them, choosing to endorse the values of that culture, internalizing and promoting them.
Changing the Metaphors for Teaching
A popular website for teachers, called TeachHUB.com, recently featured an article entitled “Back to School Prep Guide: Eight Metaphors for a Teacher.” The list included terms like Coach, Juggler, Gardener, Tour Guide, and 9-1-1 Dispatcher. These terms are very far from the “moral scholar” and “learned figure” that the Taiwanese word for teacher implies. Though American teachers may well juggle and coach, these metaphors make light of the harder work of the ideal teacher, to pass on culture, knowledge, and values in an inspiring and meaningful way.27
Teacher metaphors matter. Perhaps the most potent and lasting of the metaphors for teaching in America has been the trope of “public servant,” with an emphasis on “servant.” In the Introduction to this book, I presented a teacher’s contract from 1932 that laid out, in the most dramatic terms, how teaching was long seen as a form of worldly sacrifice, a secular kind of monastic service. This attitude may have been expressed more explicitly in certain parts of the country, but was nonetheless endemic. The expectation that teaching was service became the prevailing metaphor from the earliest recruiting of female teachers into the field. Catherine Beecher, quoted in the Introduction for her messianic views of teachers’ roles in the culture, laid the groundwork for the popularizing of the trope of service. In her essay “Remedy for the Wrongs of Women,” Beecher began her entreaty to educated women by refusing to describe the deplorable conditions of schools: “I dare not do it,” she said, rather coyly. “It would be so revolting, so disgraceful, so heart-rending, so incredible, that in the first place, I should not be believed; and in the next place, such an outcry of odium and indignation would be aroused as would impede efforts to remedy the evil of it.”28 Beecher reinforced her argument by suggesting that inborn characteristics of self-effacement and service orientation ideally position women for the role of savior.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Beecher had succeeded in recruiting an army of women into the field. Educated women from the Northeast became the self-sacrificing saviors of godless cowboys in the Wild West and of oppressed former slaves in the South. Letters and journals of these teachers documented how explicitly their mission to teach was aligned with saving souls.29 Charlotte Forten, a black, Philadelphia-educated teacher in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, concluded a journal entry in 1864 with an assertion of her sense of religious mission: “My heart sings a song of thanksgiving at the thought that even I am permitted to do something for a long-abused race, and aid in promoting a higher, holier and happier life on the Sea Islands” (p. 130).30
These perceptions of teaching as monastic service created huge barriers to change. When men began to reenter the field in the 1960s and 1970s – some out of counterculture idealism, but many to avoid service in the Vietnam War – their more aggressive efforts to build up salaries or reform pension benefits were met with widespread community hostility. Lortie wrote of this period that towns and cities replaced comfortable feelings of what he called “ritual pity” with a new stereotype of teachers as activists. Teachers who fought for their rights, engaging in collective bargaining for things as basic as a lunch break or a $200 raise, lost community support. They were no longer saints and martyrs but blue-collar workers, chastised for laziness and selfishness.31 “[Before collective bargaining] it was conventional to lament their low pay and refer to them as ‘dedicated’ workers who gave more than they received,” wrote Lortie. “But such relationships undergo change when teachers assert their collective power.”32 The rise of union activism and the strikes of the mid-1960s and 1970s effectively changed the American metaphor for teachers, introducing a new series of stereotypes, including those that ridiculed teacher education and suggested that teachers, especially male teachers, were those who failed at other occupations. George Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum, “Those who can’t do, teach” is part of the American vernacular. “Those who can’t teach, teach teachers,” is a latter-day addition to that motto, which has always seemed more troubling than funny to me.
Given all this, it is not surprising, then, that those who do make teaching a lifelong career tend to rank psychological or intrinsic rewards as primary. Surveys of teacher attitudes, conducted by the National Educational Association since 1967, have invariably ranked student motivation and indifference as the first source of teacher dissatisfaction. If professional satisfaction is largely predicated on the pleasures of serving, then a lack of student responsiveness must necessarily be a source of great heartbreak and dissatisfaction.33
What the Philosophers Say
American’s greatest educational philosopher, John Dewey, was curiously silent on the issue of service as a motivation for teaching. As a vocal advocate of teachers’ rights, however, Dewey pointed to the ironic contradiction that the very teachers who were charged with teaching children about democracy were themselves subordinated in a decidedly undemocratic system of school governance.34 Dewey’s vision about good teaching, however, did call for an intellectual rigor and subject expertise that is often overlooked in discussions about progressive pedagogy. In writing about the teacher’s need for intellectual preparation in his subject, Dewey wrote: “[Subject knowledge] should be abundant to the point of overflow … [and] it must be accompanied by a genuine enthusiasm for the subject that will communicate itself contagiously to pupils.”35 As Dewey described them, the very best teachers are not self-effacing facilitators but intellectual leaders. Indeed, we tend to think of Dewey, the father of progressive education, primarily as an advocate of child-centeredness. But anyone who has actually read his work knows that the philosopher scorned the notion of child-centeredness for its own sake. Indeed, he wrote against the excesses of child-centeredness in terms of its impact not on the student but on the teacher:
The old type of instruction tended to treat the teacher as a dictatorial ruler. The new type sometimes treats the teacher as a negligible factor, almost as an evil … though a necessary one. In reality, the teacher is an intellectual leader of a social group. She is leader not in virtue of official position, but because of wider and deeper knowledge and matured experience. The supposition that the principle of freedom confers liberty upon the pupils but that the teacher is outside its range and must abdicate all leadership, is merely silly.36
By reminding his audience of the important intellectual role of the teacher, Dewey described a kind of work that puts the adult in the forefront rather than subordinating her, that underscores her leadership position, not the service role that is so often associated with progressive education. Dewey’s ideal was for teacher-scholars whose knowledge of a subject is so profound that it frees them to focus simultaneously on all the complexities of the learner – cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional. As he described it, teaching is a profoundly multidimensional job, requiring a vast, refined skill set.
Dewey’s picture of the ideal teacher never gained much traction, either during his lifetime or after his death. Instead, as I describe above, service and sacrifice continued to represent the ideal throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps the most explicit scholarly writing on the teacher’s self-sacrificing role can be found in the work of the contemporary and widely read philosopher Nel Noddings. Noddings dramatically placed sacrifice in the forefront as key to good teaching. Indeed, her very argument – that teaching calls on an all-consuming caring from the practitioner – harkens back to the trope of sacrifice from earlier in the twentieth century. In her book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984, 2003), Noddings described the classroom as a place where there are two ethical entities: the students, whom she dubs the “cared-for,” and the teacher, the “one-caring.” In this much-quoted book, Noddings described the ideal stance of the teacher as one in which the individual student, at the moment of interaction, must “fill the firmament” of the teacher’s consciousness. Anything less than this, any self-serving motivation on the part of the teacher, is not only suspect in the abstract but actively forces the student to compromise his or her ethical ideal. In other words, the student who must compete for the teacher’s respect, or the student who acts out of a desire to impress the teacher, becomes ethically corrupted in the process. Embedded in this philosophical formula – as old as the feminization of the profession – are the seeds of professional burnout. Indeed, Noddings concluded her essay this way:
What the cared-for contributes to the relation [between teacher and student] is a responsiveness that completes the caring. This responsiveness need not take the form of gratitude or even of direct acknowledgement. Rather, the cared for shows either in direct response to the one-caring or in spontaneous delight and happy growth before her eyes that the caring has been received. The caring is completed when the cared for receives the caring. He may respond by free, vigorous, and happy immersion in his projects (toward which the one-caring has directed her own energy also), and the one-caring, seeing this, knows that the relation has been completed in the cared-for.37
Noddings described the rewards of teaching as the selfless pleasure of watching students learn and grow, an expectation that has long set teachers up for disappointment and burnout. This kind of reward is difficult to sustain and control: students don’t always respond to teacher caring. Often, in fact, they actively reject it. Through no fault of the passionate and idealistic teacher, students sometimes subvert, insult, and disrupt. We know this is true because of the high rate of teacher attrition – between 40 and 50 percent within the first five years – that still dogs the profession in America.38 This is a number that has remained fairly constant in the last thirty years and one that is higher than any other profession. Though research into this attrition shows a variety of reasons for teachers leaving, the majority points to a sense of being overwhelmed by the demands of the job and a sense of their inadequacy in the face of job expectations. When the ideal of the work calls for complete self-abnegation, it is hard to imagine how anyone would be expected to stay for more than five years.
The feminist psychologist Valerie Walkerdine has noted that child-centered pedagogy has, ironically, undermined the status of teaching. Students are no longer subject to the imperious pedagogue, but the price of their autonomy is borne by the teacher. This form of self-erasure – being fully there for the Other (recognizing each student’s individual needs, and rejoicing in the student’s unfolding development) sets up as its alternative self-absorption or self-promotion. Linked with the overwhelmingly feminine nature of the teaching workforce, the trope of self-sacrifice takes on a troubling dimension: “good” student-centered teachers, she wrote, like “good” women, create learning environments predicated on their invisible labor.39
This metaphor of service seems to have historically played a lesser role in other countries. As I discussed earlier, Asian countries saw teachers as wise men, not public servants, an attitude that reinforced the privilege of those lucky enough to study with them. Spiritual mentors and role models, surrogate parents, rabbis, gurus. These are metaphors that have historically accompanied the role of teacher in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and parts of Africa. When I asked veteran teachers in France and Germany to use metaphors for the way they perceived their own favorite teachers, the terms never suggested the notion of service: “role model,” “genius,” “taskmaster,” “sage.” Many others, however, including those who contributed chapters to this volume, have seen a change in the profession over the last twenty years. Perhaps the most blatant evidence of the change is visible in the expansion of TFA to encompass at least thirty-five other countries, including China, India, Israel, Japan, Germany, and even Sweden. The popularity of such programs, sold to idealistic young people with the same message of service and self-sacrifice that fueled the American program, signals a sea-change in global attitudes about teaching, a sense that the American metaphor has prevailed.
Teacher-Centered Schools
One of the most interesting and surprising outcomes of my work across seven cultures was in noting that the two most highly ranked countries on the PISA scale had systems of education that were almost antithetical to one another. The Finland education system was overwhelmingly concerned with student collaboration and creativity, choice, and freedom. Emotional and psychological concerns were front and center in teaching and learning. The Department of Pastoral Care attended to the students’ affective needs. At Annukka’s school, students worried about their teachers’ moods and personal lives; teacher/student soccer games cemented warm feelings; and a general sense of familiarity and friendship percolated throughout the school. In Taiwan, things couldn’t have been more different. Curricula were traditional and strictly parsed in predetermined units of study; students sat in strict rows and listened mostly to lectures presented by teachers who stood on elevated platforms. Classes were large and largely anonymous. In one class I observed, Feng-juan called on students by pulling a stick from a large bowl and reciting a number. Given such dramatic differences, how do we explain the success of both these countries on objective measures of student performance? How could two such opposing pedagogies produce similar forms of success?
I would argue that the key factor that links both these countries is the way that both cultures value the work of the teacher and transmit that message to children. But what can be transported? In a recent article in the Washington Post, Finnish educational scholar Pasi Sahlberg wrote a sobering assessment of what would happen if “Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools.”40 Burdened by teacher-effectiveness measures, by standardized testing, and the kind of teacher isolation characteristic of American schools, Finnish teachers would quickly burn out or simply fade into mediocrity. The system would drag them down. Similarly, most American teachers, transferred to Finnish schools, would become good teachers. The system would prop them up. It is tempting to argue that the single most important factor in improving quality in education is teachers, but Sahlberg rightly pointed out that this commonly articulated truism fails to take into account the full picture of what makes for a successful school. Great teachers survive only when conditions allow them to be great. That means that the schools themselves must be intelligently run, that principals and other administrators must understand and support good teaching, and that students must behave and act respectfully. Stated in my own terms, I would say that schools must be “teacher centered.” By teacher centered, I am referring not to a preference for frontal pedagogy or old-fashioned notions of teaching and learning but to policies and attitudes that incentivize strong student interest in joining the profession of teaching and that support their practice once they are hired. Ironically, Finland, the most student-centered school I visited, was also the most teacher centered. Teachers controlled what they taught and when they taught. Their classrooms were clean, well lit, and well ventilated. Teachers were served tasty, simple food in the dining room and were treated with courtesy and respect by their students. Principals were there to make things easier for the teachers, whether that meant fielding encounters with difficult parents or serving us coffee when we sat in the teachers’ room.
Today, much of this does not happen in American schools or in those schools I visited where teaching was not seen as desirable work. Take curricula, for example. In America, the fact that the majority of teachers feel that high-stakes tests are pedagogically unsound has had no impact on educational policy.41 School reform efforts most frequently proceed despite, not because of, teacher input. When states impose new curricular mandates or introduce new statewide testing, teachers are viewed as a stumbling block to implementation. Administrators are charged with “getting the teachers on board,” as if they are conscripts who might try to jump ship. One of the clichés of the profession is that teachers resist change, a statement that is often thrown around in schools and among policy-makers as if teacher recalcitrance was simply a knee-jerk and irrational response to reform. But why shouldn’t teachers react this way? Any American teacher who has spent more than a decade in the profession has already intuited what school reformers haven’t gleaned in a century of tinkering: that lasting and meaningful change doesn’t come from fiat or simply from reforms to curriculum and pedagogy. If the teachers are respected and even venerated, the school will flourish. If they are not respected, if they are seen as merely recalcitrant civil servants, the school cannot thrive.
This argument is even borne out in corporate management theory. Education policy-makers in the United States have long been influenced by the models put forward by business and industry. In the 1980s, for example, corporate downsizing and bottom-line accountability inspired lasting education policy reforms in the area of testing and teacher accountability. Cooperative learning and goals-based performance standards also have their roots in management theory. What, then, is the more recent thinking about corporate competitiveness and productivity? Many of the most influential books that have been published on this subject in the last ten years have shifted their primary focus away from concerns about markets and economies of scale. Instead, employee morale has become a central priority. Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, reflected this shift in the field when he argued that a loyal, intelligent workforce is the key to corporate competitiveness – even more important than protected or regulated markets. Companies that fail to nurture their workers, Pfeffer said, are essentially “leaving money on the table.”42 These lessons have been embraced by some of the world’s most successful companies, including Apple, Proctor & Gamble, and Starbucks, all of which instituted new policies that protect and reward employees at the short-term expense of the bottom line.43When workers are disgruntled, distracted, or poorly trained, no brilliant strategy for expanding market share will compensate for that liability. Why should it be any different in schools?
As teachers worldwide continue to age and then retire, schools will be faced with two very different challenges. First, they will have to attract excellent new people into the field. Second, they will have to figure out ways to help large numbers of older teachers stay invested and committed to their work. Every country I visited will be encountering the problem of incentives. In the face of globalization, what can teaching offer a high-achieving college student to lure him or her away from business and industry, medicine, law, or high-tech work? Obviously, schools in capitalist countries will never be able to compete in terms of salary and other material benefits. But teaching holds a natural attraction to idealistic and passionate young people, as evidenced by the success of the global Teach for All movement. In my own school, an elite liberal college that once produced large numbers of public school recruits, introductory education classes boast some of the largest enrollments in the school. Students sign up in droves for courses on educational psychology and child development. However, too many students are chased away from the field after their initial prepracticum observations in urban schools or even in our local suburban high schools. What they see when visiting schools is demoralizing to them. Teachers work in isolation, and they work with too many students. They rarely interact with other faculty members, except over rushed lunches. They teach from books they sometimes do not like themselves and that – to judge by their condition – seem to have been used by generations of students. By the time Smith students become seniors, less than a handful each year are interested in becoming certified to teach high school, to devoting their whole lives to the work. Certainly, the same is true in other countries. Students in Greece, a country that once boasted a high level of prestige for teaching, now see angry, demoralized teachers working under difficult conditions. Students in Chile see huge classes; in Azerbaijan, they see a squalid school building and a country that cannot pay its teachers a living wage. If schools around the world are to attract a new generation of educated teachers, they need to address the conditions of teaching, and do it quickly.
In terms of the burgeoning ranks of veteran teachers, the problem is even more complex. If good new teachers are hard to attract, it is even harder to reenergize those who have been victims of the system for decades. Some of these teachers, especially those in their forties and fifties, have almost half a career ahead of them. With salaries front-loaded and no vertical advancement in the field, such teachers have little incentive to grow. Their cynicism and exhaustion infect their classes. Good teaching (as any good teacher will tell you) is not only about content and curriculum. It is also about the intersection between that content and the person teaching it. For better or worse, teachers teach themselves – their value system and their sense of the world. School reformers in the United States have long worried about what should be taught, how, when, and with what materials. And yet, to a great extent, teachers are the curriculum: affect, attitude, and persona may well have a more powerful impact on classes than do the books they use or the pedagogical techniques they employ. From what I have seen, the same is true around the world.
In a famous 1932 essay entitled “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?,” the scholar George Counts accused the public schools of sharing in the blame for the economic catastrophe that had befallen the country. By failing to instill (he used the word “impose”) democratic values in young people for generations, a creeping corporate greed had gradually taken over our politics and economy. Schools must embrace their power, Counts argued. Profound changes in attitude can be brought about through schooling, but only if teachers remain free from the pressures that undercut their essential, democratic mission. I thought about Counts’s essay often during my visits to schools around the world. How free was each school to “build,” if not a new social order, then a free-thinking and principled student body? How free were teachers to use their intelligence and passion, unconstrained by nationalistic agendas or the interests of corporations? In virtually every country I visited (even Finland, where some teachers complained of a creeping new focus on bottom-line accountability), the gradual loss of teacher power and authority seems to loom as an unsettling threat to the culture.44
This shifting attitude toward the teacher worldwide seems to have a corollary in contemporary ecological criticism. Scholars have referred to the gradual destruction of the environment as “slow violence,” violence that has occurred quietly and incrementally, over decades, often out of sight of the most affluent nations. Only now, when the climate crisis is impossible to ignore, have we finally begun to acknowledge the problem and take action.45 “Slow violence,” I contend, is an apt term for the conditions of teaching across the planet. Since the turn of the last century, there has been a steady, unprecedented eroding of teacher authority and power, and a profound shift in the way teaching is perceived. In the last decade, that shift has escalated with the near-universal advent of technology, the globalization of testing, and the attrition of the world’s most educated young people from the field.
Yoking the teacher crisis with the environmental one makes sense for many reasons. The two are inextricably linked. If the ecological crisis was human-made, brought on by ignorance, corruption, and indifference, the solution is also human-made, built from new generations of environmentally conscious people designing new planet-saving technologies, living mindfully and ethically. The only way to create those future citizens is with great teachers doing their work in schools that understand the critical value of their mission: producing ethical scientists, politicians who refuse to dump their waste in poor countries, and a population of individuals who would never think to throw away, rather than recycle, a soda can. This same conceit applies to all the most urgent issues of our time: to poverty, radical fundamentalism, and racism. If the teachers don’t have the skill and intelligence to change the hearts and minds of young people, who will? It is time to understand that teachers, more than any other group, are the healing white blood cells of the planet, the last line of defense against whatever future challenges we, the human race, are destined to confront.
