(Why) are teachers not respected?

Great Debates
1

Hi all

In the UK (and, I sense, the US), teaching is not normally seen as a particularly prestigious line of work. While some people might describe it as ‘noble’ or ‘rewarding’, essentially it doesn’t have the same levels of classic prestige that careers in law or medicine (say…) have, nor the flat-out ‘at least I have money’ cool of banking and finance. Indeed, of all the white-collar professions, I’d posit that teaching is probably right down there at the bottom in terms of professional reputation. Maybe above estate-agents and insurance salesmen, though…

However, I might be wrong. Maybe people everywhere are genuinely admiring, respectful and grateful towards teachers and what they do.

Or, maybe teachers really aren’t very highly regarded because they shouldn’t be, maybe they really are the losers and misfits who ‘couldn’t hack it in the real world’ (a la Tom Cruise in Cocktail), and so retreated to the classroom because there was no-where else to go.

Or, perhaps, actually, teachers are *kinda-*respected because they *kinda-*deserve to be. Is being a history teacher as kick-ass as being a spinal surgeon? Nope - but, then, the latter requires more skill and expertise.

Are teachers not respected by society at large?
If so, should they be?

2

One theory is the feminisation of the profession led to a decline in status. In days gone by the village would have a vicar and schoolteacher: the two wise men of the village (and possibly a doctor if you’re going for a trinity). When women started becoming teachers the status dropped as did the pay. Now teachers are lowest of the low. No pay, no status and we expect them turn children into doctors and physicist.

Being a teacher actually does require great skill and expertise. Places where children consistently perform in the top for maths & reading have extremely highly educated teachers (PhD even). They are also paid more and the profession is highly respected.

3

Probably lots of little things instead of one big factor. I had great teachers, horrible teachers and a lot in between. I know people who became teachers and have a wide range of opinions of them.

From the supply and demand perspective, there are lots of people who can teach at the good-enough-to-not-be-fired level. Significantly fewer who can sink three pointers consistenty, make it thru the academic gates to even try brain surgery, etc.

4

Two articles that discuss how the status of a teaching position impacts the education of students:

Economist

HuffPo

You can also check out PISA rankings and look into teachers in the top performing countries. Basically, in Finland and South Korea being a teacher is awesome sauce. Contrary to what people think, being a primary school teacher requires great skill and knowledge, and when you select the absolute best your students do better. You can only choose from the best if being a teacher carries great status.

5

I’m not sure it’s feminisation so much as the publicization – in addition to that, the fact that teaching became a focused profession likely plays a part.

Basically, in the old days the people who were taught were nobles or other well-off people. They were taught by other nobles, but these nobles weren’t always (or even often) “teachers” they were people who regularly did the job. The prince might be taught war strategy by the actual war strategist of the kingdom, and swordsmanship by an accomplished veteran. He may be taught language and philosophy by respected philsophers and scholars. While many people’s jobs may at one point in time have been focused on teaching, they were accomplished beforehand. Even those that, strictly, weren’t had the money and name to garner respect even if in reality they weren’t that great.

Then suddenly you get public schooling, there are so many things to teach so many people you simply can’t put a respected scholar in [history | math | biology] in every classroom. So you get a bunch of people who know enough about each subject in that classroom to teach students. And that’s their job, teaching, and that’s it. They aren’t (usually) active in whatever field they teach. This is why university professors get at least some respect, IMO. Because a lot of their job is research, they do things in their field and advance knowledge rather than just imparting wisdom on others – but they do that AS WELL.

Does that mean career teachers aren’t smart? Well, some of them aren’t, and I understand that education majors have some of lowest GPAs out of all college graduates (though that’s likely a feedback loop with the lack of respect/prestige), but not necessarily. Good teaching is a skill separate from knowledge – you can know tons of things and suck at explaining them, or fail to inspire students to want to learn. Teachers, at least the good ones, deserve respect and are very talented individuals. However, I strongly suspect the lack of respect for them stems from the fact that they don’t do anything other than teach, so they’re not seen as advancing knowledge in any real way.

There’s also a bit of self fulfillment, I think. The idea is that a smart person wouldn’t want to be a teacher due to lack of prestige and opportunities to advance their field, therefore anybody who takes the job is dumb. And if you leave it due to it being thankless and do something else, it’s only proof that smart people can’t stand to be teachers for long. One hell of a catch, that catch 22.

6

Also, I think it’s partially a symptom of “knowledge for its own sake” being diminished as a value. It used to be a positive thing to be able to sit around and do nothing but play with abstract concepts and write about the nature of god. Mostly because it was a sign of wealth that you had time to do that. Nowadays knowledge isn’t as respected unless it’s applied. There’s a bit of a “yes, but how does this make me a better computer/toaster/car/whatever” question to everything. Knowledge for its own sake isn’t valued, so why would people who impart basic knowledge be?

7

I think it’s a pretty complex issue, history, women and education interacting together. It differs between places, of course. Here is a report that mentions some of the issues. It’s a PDF, scroll to page 16.

It’s probably impossible to definitively say feminisation caused a decrease in status, but it’s also hard to argue the two are unrelated. If women have a lower status than men, and are dominant in a certain profession, that profession is unlikely to have a very high status.

8

The latest theory I heard (and I agree that it’s not due to one cause, but many) is that back when teaching and nursing were the only acceptable thinking professions for a woman, they were able to take only the best and the brightest - and school districts were able to pay them like crap, because women didn’t have much in the way of options. Then engineering and law and doctoring and lots and lots of other professions which require high intelligence, high drive and high skill opened up to women. As these were previously “male” occupations, they offer better pay, prestige and/or working conditions, and the best and the brightest no longer go into teaching (or nursing, for that matter) because they can do better.

9

Individual teachers can certainly be respected, but I think almost all of us had at least one who didn’t want to be there, hated their subject and hated the students.

Take for example my Dad’s French teacher, who started the first class by saying ‘There’s only one thing in French you need to know- Je ne parle pas français,’ then spent the next two years doing crosswords or snoozing at his desk. I didn’t have any quite that bad, but there were some pretty dire ones at my school, as well as some excellent teachers; inspiring, interesting people who were dedicated to education, who I still have a lot of liking and respect for.

I think for a lot of us, it was our first real exposure to adults who considered showing up and doing the absolute bare minimum to be doing a job, or adults who took the opportunity to bully, and it was in a situation where we couldn’t do anything about it. Like all things that happen to us when we’re still growing up, it makes a big impression, but we’re not as good at really seeing it clearly- the two arsehole teachers can make us view all teachers as kind of arseholes, because we never saw adults quite as much as individuals back then.

By the way, as an adult, I spent time working with a lot of school groups, and I still encountered plenty of teachers who had no place working with children (or working with anyone in some cases), as well as some lovely people, so this is not just coming from the fact I did not enjoy school.

I would definitely support both increased sensibly managed oversight, to pick out the failing teachers, and increased wages for those who show skill and dedication. I’m sure it wouldn’t be easy to get all the dead weight out of there, especially as some kids are horrendously entitled and difficult to work with, but I think it needs doing.

10

I haven’t read the whole thing, but this article seems to argue that we’re both sort of right. Feminization seems to be both a cause and effect of it. After the industrial revolution, many jobs paid better than teaching, so as men moved to industry it became acceptable for women to “fill the gaps” in the now lower-prestige position. However, women were paid less than men (and thus more desirable, because they were cheaper) which increased feminization – but as the wages decreased in tandem with the feminization increasing, the prestige also lowered to a further degree than it already had. In addition, since the profession became more publicized and widespread, we needed a lot more teachers, which meant a lot more people and since women were willing to work for cheap then, yup, it became less and less prestigious as it became cheaper.

It seems to me that it’s not so much that “women entering the profession lowered its prestige” so much as “as the profession lowered in prestige, women entered it (but the lower wages served to damage it further)” not that the latter is much better than the former.

11

I think there’s something to this but I’m not sure you’re quite correct. I wonder if, rather, it’s more a case of fewer men wanting to become teachers rather than more women wanting to become teachers? After all, who’d be a male teacher in today’s schools with the ever-present possibility of malicious accusations?

Absolutely, but it’s great skill and expertise in teaching more than the subject.

12

I should mention that, at least in certain sectors, teaching experience is held pretty highly. For instance, the likes of Google and Microsoft go out of their way to find people who TA’d or otherwise taught subjects in their field. Their interviews even consist of questions like “teach me <x> like you’d teach it to your grandma.” (Let’s hope your grandma wasn’t Grace Hopper or they might not get what they were intending ;))

It seems to be a quirk of non-tech/science businesses (or at least the vague “general populace”) that hold “those who can’t do teach” mentality.

13

Don’t you think that on a personal level people tend to remember bad or unfair teachers, or teachers in a particularly vexing subject for that person, who demanded better performance from students whether they were motivated or not? I think these personal issues (which are usually at least as much attributable to poor students as to poor teachers) lie at the root of resentment towards the teaching profession itself. “I don’t know why, but there’s just something about teachers that fills me with seething, unreasonable anger and contempt. I vote NO on the proposition to pay teachers a living wage and treat them respectfully, and you know, I feel pretty good about that vote.”

14

There’s a good research brief here from Stanford that explains how teaching is seen in Finland.

15

I’ve heard thoughts like this a lot. And I work with a lot of male teachers. And I have never once, in my years of teaching, heard a male teacher express a sentiment like that.

Now, of course, we might be a self-selecting group: those of us who went into teaching might just be the ones who don’t think it’s a real worry. But the thing is, in all my conversations with male teachers about every aspect of the profession, this thought has come up only once or twice, and always in reference to one or another particular student, not as a generalized risk. And never as something that would make us consider leaving the job.

I really don’t think it’s a real factor.

The feminization of the profession is something I’ve thought about for a long time. I’ll post more thoughts later; making daughter’s oatmeal now.

16

I’ve been a high school teacher for over a decade. I’ve never felt personally disrespected, though I think that’s probably because I have a great deal of respect, myself, for education and teachers, and so I think I probably often assume respect when none was intended. But I have some thoughts on the matter. I tend to agree with the feminization argument raised above, but I think there are a few other factors:

The first problem, I think, is that as a society, we are pretty fatalistic about success. A truly shocking number of people feel like good/talented kid will do well, and slow/lazy kids will not, and that parenting and especially teaching plays little or no part in it. I think some of this has to do with the way memory and learning works: we are much better at remembering things than we are at remembering where we learned them (this is why it’s easy to implant memories in kids). So all that crap you know and can do? That just happened “naturally”, and would have come about whatever you spent your youth doing. It’s just common sense. Teachers are as bad about this as anyone, for the record: it drives me insane.

Another problem is that when a teacher is really doing their job, it seems like they aren’t doing much. The teacher’s work is in the prep, the reflection, and the feedback: if all that is done well (and it takes place out of view), then when kids remember the class, they remember that they worked hard, they had to really think, they learned a lot. They don’t think of it in terms of “My assignments were well pitched to my level of understanding, so that I could independently figure out the next step. I was asked just the right questions that allowed me to see connections I would not otherwise have seen. My best work was carefully picked out of pages of drivel so that I could see what I needed to build on, and the significant mistakes–the ones that were not just careless bullshit I would grow out of, or really too hard for me to be willing to grapple with–were pointed out so that I could advance. My work was returned in a timely fashion, carefully graded, so that the feedback was meaningful. My confidence was built when it needed to be, and I was brought up short when I needed to be”. Kids don’t see any of that. They just see “That was a good class”, and they know that in a weaker class it’s missing, but they don’t understand what goes into it: they think it just happens.

Related to that is the fact that people tend to think they could teach: they just don’t understand that it’s a specialized skill that takes years to hone. I teach AP English Language and a couple AP Economics courses. People are tremendously more respectful about the Economics, which I find hysterical. Economics is easy to teach. It’s clearly defined. English easily takes up 75% of my time and energy, despite the fact that I have taught it for far longer. But since most people feel they can read, think and write clearly, they think they get it: they think the content is the tricky part. This is not true.

Lastly (for now) I think the Education field itself tends to be disrespectful towards teachers. On the administrative level, from Assistant Principal to Superintendent, everyone is someone who saw teaching as a stepping stone, and who views themselves as having been promoted above it. There is a consistent thread among administrators that career teachers lack ambition, or work ethic, or imagination. Part of that is the pay scale: at the end of a career, a principal is making 30-40% more than a teacher–why would anyone stay a teacher, then, if they didn’t have to, if they didn’t simply fail to make the cut, or lacked the courage to even try? This is why administrators like young teachers; they can forgive them for still being teachers. Teachers themselves internalize this attitude: half the teachers in my building are getting M.eds in administration.

ETA: LFoD, do a great many people assume you are planning on going into admin? One thing I have noticed is that people think it’s ok for a man to want to be a principal, and that teaching is ok if it’s basically an internship for their real job. But for a man to be called to teach is suspect (not that he might be a creep, but that he’s lacking some ambitious quality).

17

industry wants to locate where taxes and wages are low, skills are high. good skills require good schools. good schools require respected teachers with decent wages. well paid and qualified teachers and schools require higher taxes. So, industry doesn’t go where schools are excellent. they recruit from all over for their skilled jobs and draw people from areas where the public was willing to pay well for great educators…so, the places where great education is encouraged become poorer, less able to pay for great education. etc. etc.

18

Anecdotally, that’s exactly the way my university worked. We had a freshman honors dorm that was all freshmen except for the 5 staff members, and about 15-20 sophomore mentors, and everyone, sophomores included, were scholarship recipients and honors students.

I lived there my freshman year, and was hired as an RA for the next 3, and out of roughly 700 women who went through the dorm, “education” was just about the least common major that I can remember. Yet, 25 years before 1991 (when I started) these women would have all been vying for teaching and nursing spots, because there wouldn’t be many slots in microbiology, math or botany open to them.

So in other words, it’s not feminization of the profession, but the equalization of opportunity for women that caused the profession to plummet.

19

One additional, horrifying dynamic:

I’m, to be arrogant, an excellent college student. When I went back to school to get my degree, I got all As.

In response to my excellence, I had not one but two professors–both of them in the education department–discourage me from becoming a teacher. They thought I was wasting myself by becoming a teacher, told me instead I ought to get my doctorate and become an education professor.

There are plenty of wonderful teachers out there (and, of course, some real stinkers), but our system is set up to actively discourage intellectual folks from joining the profession.

20

I agree (and it’s something my career teacher mother also railed against for 35 years*) but I also don’t think teaching is unique in this regard. I see the same thing in nursing, and my husband got the same thing in paramedicine. Anyone who isn’t enrolled in the next degree or seeking the next position with more managerial, administrative or (perhaps ironically in this discussion) teaching duties is seen as lazy and unambitious. There’s very little value placed on “only” being a good bedside nurse or a great street 'medic. The line cook is “only” a stepping stone to being the Chef. The city legislator is constantly asked when she’s running for state office, and the state legislator expected to run for federal, eventually. I think we’ve generally, as a culture, swallowed the idea that there’s a hierarchy of value, and entry level is, y’know, on the ground floor.

*For the past 10 years, she’s added a rant about how new teachers largely suck. And I don’t think it’s sour grapes or nostalgia. She’s talking about young teachers who don’t know basic math and grammar, much less classroom control or lesson planning. That’s where she sees the “less than the best and brightest” factor at work. It was one thing to take an ambitious, very bright young woman who had a solid elementary and high school education and teach her how to teach what she knew. But more and more, Mom’s seeing people who don’t have a solid elementary education trying to teach what they don’t even know. That’s a problem.