I’m listening to the audiobook version of So…Anyway, the memoir of John Cleese.
In the late 1950s during his last year at Clifton College, he was accepted by Cambridge University, but was told he would have to wait two years due to the glut of students* planning to attend.
To occupy his time during the interval, his headmaster suggested he stay on at Clifton and teach English and history, not even his best subjects. He was assured that, as he would be teaching ten-year-olds he could manage it by merely staying a page or two ahead in the textbook. So he did, and apparently managed to carry it off. (Note: I’m still in this part of the book, so no spoilers please.)
How common was this sort of thing, and why was it allowed? One would think the tuition-paying parents would object to their kids being taught by less than fully qualified masters. Was there an underlying concept that any graduate of such a school should have been well and thoroughly enough educated as to be able to turn right around and become a teacher there?
And does this sort of thing still happen?
*The glut was because of the recent abolition of mandatory military service.
Hmm, Clifton College. Checking says it’s students ages are from 2 (!) to 18. So, the higher classes are like high school in the US.
For US colleges there are TAs who might be recent graduates teaching classes. I did this 3 years after I entered. One of my high school classmates was in one class I taught and another had a fellow student from an English class the term before. And the supervision was basically non-existent.
But that’s a step up.
For high schools in the US, even student teachers have a couple years under their belt and have a great deal of supervision.
The only exception I’ve been exposed to are substitute teachers. I know that our district will accept a recent grad into their sub pool. But not for full time work.
TAs are this. They are frequently the only *effective *lecturers in college - the TA “help session” for calculus 3 is much, much more valuable than the big lecture, for instance. And they do the grading of all your tests and homeworks. So de facto, most of the real “teaching” effort is being done by students who may be as little as 1 semester ahead of you.
Before the Balfour Act in 1902, most teachers didn’t have formal training - it was on-the-job. Cite. Change happens gradually, particularly in tradition-bound institutions like English public (ie private) schools. They were often harking back to the nineteenth century where the process of starting up a school was no more regulated than the process of setting up a tutoring company is today.
My mother taught first grade English in Pakistan (in the 1950s) after completing 10th grade.
It wouldn’t have happened when I was at that same school in the 1970s. By that time Kindergarten teachers needed to have finished 12th grade. By now they need to have a two year degree (old) or a four year degree (new) to teach any grade.
I reckon things have changed in the UK and US as well in the last 50-60 years.
I would hope that a Cambridge-bound graduate of Clifton could quite easily teach English grammar and History to a ten year old. That’s 5th grade in the US.
Bill Cosby(I know, now disgraced) taught briefly before making a success at comedy. I heard him on Larry King talk about how they put him in a high school math class and he didn’t know any of the math.
He went home, practiced the next chapter or section, came in and taught it. Went home, did the next part, and came in and taught it.
He managed to keep it up the entire time until he learned the math.
There’s a great gap between having mastered the basics of English grammar and history, and having mastered the pedagogic skills need to teach them - or anything else - to a class of 10-year olds. The point is that the 18-year old Cleese had no qualifications or training of any kind in teaching.
To answer the OP, this used to be quite common - junior masters in the preparatory schools for English public schools were quite often recently out of the public schools themselves, and marking time before (or sometimes just after) going to university.
The main point of going to a public school was not to acquire a first-rate education; it was to make the right social connections, acquire the right social polish, and imbibe the values and attitudes that would make for success in British society.
In the 90’s as a computer science grad I was talked into doing the same thing in pretty much.
I was not sure what my next steps were after college, and decided to bum it a “lesser”* school for a semester to get my head straight. I went in to talk to the CS department about enrolling there to see about taking a class or two that I though I could dig into.
I talked to the secretary, then to a prof, and finally to a CS Dean who could have sold used cars in Atlantis, and walked out 3 hours later enrolled as a Teaching assistant in Fortran and Java sections starting in 4 days, both languages I had never learned before. I was literally teaching syntax i only first read a day before at times.
The rules for teaching were a good deal looser in the 1950s than they are today. Here in the U.S. my aunt was teaching in private schools despite not getting her college degree until the 1960s. Even by the late 1960s, when my wife got her first bachelor’s degree and teaching certificate, it was a life certification (i.e., she never would have had to take any kind of continuing education, or even a test to be recertified.) It wasn’t until the 1970s that more rigorous standards became the norm throughout the U.S.
Not sure about USA - but in many provinces in Canada - real teachers need to have a teaching certificate, which usually means 2 or 3 years at teacher college after a 3-year degree at least in some other subject. In the good old days, you could get a teacher’s certificate from community college in 2 years. Many years ago nothing formal was required.
But… most school boards in Canada also need substitute teachers, who go in and prevent the class from getting out of control while the regular teacher is off sick. Requirements vary, but “graduated high school” is the minimum for some, it seems. I know several university students who came home from first year university and used the remainder of May and June to be substitute teachers. A number of the students I knew in the 80’s did this, they would register as substitutes in Toronto, and if necessary skip classes to make some money the odd day the did get called. One girl I remember after second year was specifically requested to be a full-time fill in for someone on maternity leave for 2 months once university exams were done - but she was the star pupil at the high school when she was there. She said the weirdest thing was making kids only a few years younger accept that she was a for-real teacher.
OTOH, years ago the theory was with a teaching degree you could teach anything. Our chem teacher one year was hired at the last minute a month into class when it was discovered the first chem teacher was a total incompetent (and he was actually fired). The new teacher freely admitted she was an English major and was just trying to stay a chapter or two ahead of the class.
Back when my mother attended Normal School, entrance requirements were the Basic Baccalaurate (7th grade); Normal itself was 3 grades, they had their teaching degrees by the time those in the Advanced Baccalaurate were in 10th grade; thanks to her late-September birthdate, Mom was in charge of a room full of kids age 5-10 being 15yo herself. Someone who had an Advanced Bac actually had one more year of schooling than a Normal Teacher. Nowadays a teacher who’s anything beyond “the person who puts kindergartners to nap” is required to have training at the Grado level, equivalent to an American Bachelor’s.
Note, everyone, that despite the school in the OP’s example being called “College”, the job was teaching ten-year-olds.
And my mom’s favorite teacher (which would have been at about that same time, but in the US) had started teaching at age 14, because the principal saw early that she was very good at it. She was an outlier even then, but it says something that it was even possible.
Teachers nowadays must have qualifications, but most of them still have no training of any kind in teaching. There are college courses in the education department that you have to take, but at most colleges, the skills presented in those courses bear no relationship whatsoever to teaching skills.
To the OP, there’s a couple of factors at play here. Firstly, the past is a different country, where the idea of ‘teaching qualifications’ was a much looser concept.
The second point is that private schools don’t have to follow some Government recognised system, so in theory they could still offer teaching roles to people without recognised qualifications. The state school system, in contrast, is strict in its demands for fully qualified teachers.
However the reality is that with competition for teaching places, and increased academic focus, private schools would be unlikely to take on teachers without nationally recognised qualifications. But they could.
The vast majority of teaching degrees or postgraduate teacher training courses in the UK involve in-school teaching experience (noting that courses and quals vary across UK countries). It would be pretty rare for a NQT for their first post-qualification job to be their first time in a classroom.