TEACHERS

Scott J. Seregny

Sociologists of the professions have long recognized teaching as one of the least autonomous of professions, indeed a "semiprofession," distinct from medicine or law. Much of this has to do with teachers' ambiguous but decisive relationship to the rise of modern European states and state intervention in popular education, first in many of the German states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, later in France, and still later and less completely in Great Britain and Russia. The transformation of teaching from a part-time craft lacking formal qualifications to a full-time profession was directly connected to the establishment of state-sponsored mass education systems designed to discipline and integrate populations and maintain political and social order in response to the rapid population growth, economic transformation, and political upheaval (including the dramatic reshaping of state territories) that marked western and central Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. Teachers' responses to these developments were complex. Most teachers, when given the chance, identified state initiatives as "progressive" and supported state intervention as a means of emancipation from the local interests that had previously controlled schooling. Most supported and helped implement state projects for national integration. For example, French teachers under the Third Republic helped marginalize Breton and regional dialects in favor of the French language. In multinational states, however, teachers sometimes played significant roles in minority national movements seeking autonomy and language rights in schools. In revolutionary crises—1848 in Germany and 1905 in Russia—teachers often played visible leadership roles in popular movements for reform or revolution, although conservatives vastly exaggerated their participation.

Teachers' social and professional status was powerfully shaped by governments and the expectations of elites as to the role teachers and schools should play. To free themselves from community and parental control and to escape the uncertainty of local school financing, teachers often sought the security and status of inclusion in civil service ranks, even if such bureaucratization prevented them from attaining the professional autonomy won by physicians, lawyers, and other higher-status groups. Nevertheless, teachers had some success in shaping state policies to meet their corporate interests. Although teachers in most of Europe saw autonomy from local officials, clergy, and parents as a sine qua non for professional development and the state as a buffer against local pressure, they were not immune to the expectations expressed by local communities and the parents of their pupils. Since most teachers came from the same or similar social milieus, they readily identified with popular aspirations, particularly during revolutionary crises. In such instances, when teachers confronted both official resistance to reasonable professional goals and popular pressure to side with the population they served, they opposed the state.

Teachers' relationship to the communities they served was just as ambivalent. In training, ambition, and self-image, teachers accepted the mission to "civilize" peasants and workers. Teachers fought to detach schooling from communal control, and this struggle was central to their professionalization. In terms of social status and self-image, teachers distanced themselves from "the people." While the majority of teachers, especially men, came from humble origins, they aspired to a middle-class or at least a lower-middle-class status, for which their education, lifestyle, and dress supposedly outfitted them. Middle-class respectability, education, and notability, they assumed, would enhance teachers' authority in the community and facilitate their civilizing mission as role models of modernity, sobriety, and order. Most teachers embraced this professional image. So did states, and teachers' failure to live up to such respectability by frequenting taverns, playing cards, or engaging in improper sexual liaisons was often punished by school officials. Nevertheless, teachers also identified strongly with popular interests, such as pressures to democratize education by facilitating access for lower-class children to secondary and higher education. This in turn reflected teachers' resentment over the limitations placed in the way of their own educational advancement and mobility into the upper reaches of the education bureaucracy. The trajectory of teachers' professionalization was guided by their relations—sometimes marked by cooperation, at other times by conflict—with both the state and the people.

BEFORE PROFESSIONALIZATION—TEACHING AS A CRAFT

Before the nineteenth century most governments paid little attention to schooling. Nevertheless, after the Renaissance and the Reformation many children (especially boys) in western and parts of central Europe experienced some instruction. Local communities and religious congregations supported a bewildering variety of "schools." In terms of training, certification, remuneration, autonomy, and public expectations, few "professionals" taught in the schools of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Teachers were "schoolmasters," a term suggesting that both community and teacher considered teaching a craft. Whether teachers were permanent residents in the community or seasonal migrants, teaching was a part-time occupation, and parents sent their children for instruction when they grasped its utility and when economic circumstances allowed.

Teachers' skills varied widely. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland teachers with university training offered instruction in Latin to village boys in church-run parish schools, and a few of these "lads of parts" went on to university. In England and Wales a diversity of charity and voluntary day schools sponsored by religiously affiliated societies, working-class-sponsored private schools, and other schools proliferated by the early nineteenth century. Teachers' qualifications also varied tremendously. By the 1830s, when the British state began offering grants to some of these schools with the requirement that they were subject to a new inspectorate, church organizations began providing teachers with formal training. By contrast, however, as late as 1851 some seven hundred private-school teachers could not sign the census form since they could not write even their own names. Everywhere, teachers were recruited from among marginal men, demobilized soldiers, or artisans who had failed at their chosen occupations.

In France and elsewhere the Catholic revival during the seventeenth century led to a proliferation of religious teaching orders, which offered basic instruction free of charge in communal schools. Removed from education during the revolution, the teaching orders rebounded after 1815. During the 1860s nuns constituted more than a third of all elementary teachers in France. Their formal qualifications often amounted to only a letter of obedience from their superiors, but they provided solid instruction in reading and writing to the increasing numbers of girls attending France's mostly sex-segregated primary schools. In 1870, three-fifths of the girls were taught by sisters who belonged to some five hundred congregations. In most cases teachers' qualifications were even less formal, and educational efforts were less organized. As in other crafts, teachers offered their services at fairs and markets. In the Vaucluse region of southeastern France, teachers from Alpine villages appeared at local markets, where they offered their skills to lowland villages. Migrant teachers sported feathers in their caps advertising their skills. One feather signified their willingness to teach reading and writing, two their ability to offer ciphering, and three their knowledge of Latin. Training, if it occurred, was limited to apprenticeship with a schoolmaster. In England and to some extent in France pupil-monitors worked with groups of younger children under the direction of a master teacher.

Teachers were often hired for a season between harvest and spring planting. Classes and teachers' lodging rotated among peasant homes, and teachers subsisted from the monthly fees they collected from parents, sometimes paid in bread or wine. In Bavaria, Baden, and other German states schools were more formal institutions with their own buildings and formalized financing. Until the mid-nineteenth century, salaries remained low, below those earned by unskilled laborers and petty clerks. In Russia this was still the case fifty years later. Contracts often stipulated that teachers would receive a plot of land that peasants would help work, and such arrangements persisted into the early twentieth century. Many arrangements placed teachers in a dependent and sometimes confrontational relationship with parents and community. Teachers often had to collect the school fees from poor parents, a situation guaranteed to make them unpopular, particularly during a period when peasants did not place a high premium on regular school attendance.

In much of Europe teaching remained a part-time occupation, and those who entered it usually combined it with other work, most commonly as "lay clerics" assisting the local priest or pastor. In France, the German states, and elsewhere teachers served as sacristans or sextons who rang the church bells, lit candles, dug graves, swept the church, and played the organ during services. These duties, enumerated in detail in the contracts local communities offered to teachers, reflected popular expectations. Parents expected teachers to lead their pupils to church, keep them silent during the liturgy, and help prepare them for first Communion. Clergy asserted their prerogative to visit the classroom at any time and report on their observations.

When schools began to proliferate in Russia, especially after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, villages supported communal schools, where retired soldiers, unemployed sons of clergy (in Russia a legal "estate"), and other marginal types offered rudimentary instruction. In this way Russia followed patterns that had long characterized teaching in western Europe. Throughout Europe schools were largely supported and controlled by local communities before the nineteenth century. Teachers' qualifications were informal and uncertified. Where clerical supervision of schools existed, priests were more interested in the moral-religious influence teachers exerted in the classroom and beyond. States were remote from teachers' daily lives, even under Frederick the Great in Prussia, where the government issued decrees on compulsory schooling but lacked the means to implement them effectively. Everywhere teachers remained dependent on local communities and clergy, neither of which supported an image of teaching as a professional vocation dedicated to a transcendent civilizing mission. Local interests and expectations prevailed in defining the teacher as a craftsperson. One teacher recalled his own days as a pupil in early-nineteenth-century Bavaria, remembering that on Shrove Tuesday it was the custom for the teacher to whip all of the children since local peasants believed that such beatings prevented worms in farm animals. Popular attitudes toward schooling, local financial control, and the neglect of schooling by European states meant that teaching remained an occupation of low and uncertain status.

STATE INTERVENTION AND TEACHER TRAINING

Official neglect began to give way at the close of the eighteenth century, and states asserted greater control over schools and teachers during the next century. Ministries of education established staffs of school inspectors who certified teachers' qualifications and supervised their classroom performance. States gradually assumed more of the costs of financing schools and offered teachers minimum salaries, a crucial development that lessened teachers' dependence on local communities and eventually supported a more secure, middle-class existence and professional status. To varying degrees and within limits, governments also supported teachers' efforts to form professional associations that fought for educational reforms and professional goals. The pace and extent of state intervention, however, was uneven. Germany led the way, followed by France, where the Guizot Law of 1833 mandated that local communes provide teachers with a minimum salary of two hundred francs and created an inspectorate that supervised schools and certified teachers' qualifications. Under the Second Empire (1852–1870), officials gained effective control over the hiring, transfer, and firing of teachers. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1880s, under the Ferry Laws, that state intervention was fully realized with the government assuming the cost of teachers' salaries, which significantly freed them from local control and raised their status.

In Russia most of these developments were incomplete before 1914. Not until the eve of World War I did the Russian government assume the cost of teachers' salaries. Elsewhere the minimum salaries that the governments of France, Britain, and Germany provided in the 1830s and later were critical to achieving teacher security (support for a teacher with a family), independence, and the respect that was believed inherent in a middle-class lifestyle. As a minor notable, the teacher's lifestyle had to be distinguished from that of the people. Nevertheless, teacher pay rose slowly and unevenly during the nineteenth century, and at mid-century many teachers still lived on the edge of poverty. When unskilled urban workers in France commanded incomes of 645 francs, three-quarters of the teachers earned between 450 and 500 francs. In Germany, France, Italy, and Britain teaching became materially secure only toward the end of the century. In Russia rural teachers with families still found it difficult on the eve of the war to provide their own children with a secondary education, a source of extreme bitterness and frustration.

Nearly everywhere the first effective state intervention in primary schooling occurred in the area of teacher training. The first normal schools were established in Prussia and other parts of Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. After the mid-nineteenth century, most teachers had received such training. Future teachers typically finished the public primary school at age fourteen, then took classes at a preparatory institution that augmented what they had learned at primary school, and finally at age eighteen entered a normal school, where they spent three years concentrating on pedagogy. Victor Cousin's favorable report on normal schools stimulated their expansion in France. The Guizot Law of 1833 mandated the establishment of a normal school in every department, and their numbers rose from fourteen in 1830 to seventy-four in 1837. Most of these trained men, but beginning in the 1880s a parallel network of women's normal schools was created. By 1869 France had seventy-six normal schools for men and eleven for women; by 1887 ninety and eighty-one respectively. Not all teachers graduated from normal schools. Some passed an examination to receive the teaching certificate that functioned as a kind of advanced degree for those with a primary education and that opened up employment as lower-level bureaucrats for the railroad. Not all normal school graduates remained in teaching, although rates of turnover decreased in the late nineteenth century as teachers' material security improved. Still, state training expanded so rapidly in France that by 1848 some 27 percent of teachers were normal school graduates and by 1863 half were.

In most European countries teachers were recruited from the peasantry, artisans, lower middle class, and working class. When women began to enter teaching in large numbers toward the end of the nineteenth century, they continued to come largely from the families of prosperous peasants, artisans, and minor officials in France, Britain, and other western European countries. In Russia, in light of the much slower development of girls' primary education, women teachers were drawn from the middle class, nobility, and clerical estate, but by the early twentieth century increasing numbers of peasant girls were entering the profession. Nearly everywhere an increasing percentage of teachers, male and female, were children of teachers. For such sons and later daughters of "the people," study in the relatively expensive secondary schools that opened a path to higher education for the children of the bourgeoisie was an unattainable goal. Normal school training, by contrast, offered a more realistic if modest prospect of educational and social advancement, one consistent with the nineteenth-century state's goal of creating schools that would civilize and acculturate the lower classes while maintaining existing social hierarchies. Most normal school students received scholarships covering tuition, room, and board in return for signing a contract that they would teach for a minimum number of years (ten years in France). When they emerged from the normal school, teachers could be counted among the small minority of the population who had received an education through the age of twenty. Nevertheless, in most cases they were not considered part of the educated middle class of nineteenth-century Europe, those who had passed through elite secondary institutions (often with classical curricula) and institutions of higher education.

When in the 1870s the Russian Ministry of Education and noble-dominated local governments, the zemstvos, established "teachers' seminaries" modeled after the Prussian normal school, preference and tuition stipends were given to peasant sons. The assumption was that these recruits would easily accept rural living conditions and would be less subversive than outsiders to the established social and political order. Normal schools were often established in remote areas, far from the temptations of the city, and students lived a rigidly monitored, almost monastic existence with little free time outside dormitory and classroom. Here Russians hewed closely to the model of teacher training developed in Germany and adopted in France earlier in the century.

In all countries normal school education was carefully limited. This was especially so during the decade following the revolutions of 1848, in which some teachers had played visible roles. Conservatives repeatedly warned against the dangers of overeducating future teachers and creating alienated, marginal men who might exercise a negative influence in classrooms and local communities. In Prussia, for example, the Stiehl Regulations (1854) limited normal school curricula and heavily emphasized religion. In France the conservative Falloux Law (1850) temporarily reinforced clerical supervision of teachers. Conservatives in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century still proposed recruitment of former noncommissioned officers as teachers in place of trained professionals. However, from the 1860s teacher training began to deemphasize religion and to include subjects like pedagogy, science, history, and geography, in line with an expanded primary school curriculum designed to produce citizens and skilled workers. Such reforms left intact the educational caste-line that separated the closed systems of primary and elite secondary schooling, largely preventing teachers from continuing their education beyond the normal school. Teachers were educated, but within well-defined limits designed to keep them within the social orbit from which they came and to keep them in teaching. Their task remained to enlighten and socialize the children of the lower classes, who were expected to remain in their orbit as well.

Despite the limitations, normal schools offering standardized training, closer regulation of teachers' credentials, and the common experience of studying under the mentorship of supportive instructors nurtured an esprit de corps and professional identity among young men who entered teaching during the nineteenth century. A similar development occurred in France and other countries when normal schools were opened in the second half of the century to train women teachers. In both instances the schools instilled a new pride in academic achievement and a sense of mission to enlighten the people. In western and central Europe this professional identity was soon supported by teachers' associations, regular conferences, summer refresher courses, and a professional press. In Russia, due to the state's financial weakness and the vast number of teachers required to achieve universal schooling, the state never gained anything like the monopoly over teacher training that was established in the West. The number of normal schools training women teachers in Russia failed to keep up with the huge demand for teachers from this population, with the result that in the early twentieth century female recruits were still drawn from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, including secondary women's gymnasiums and the diocesan schools (mostly daughters of priests).

As teaching became more "professional," in the limited sense of becoming a full-time career with recognized qualifications, and as European states promoted teaching as vital to their missions of civilizing the lower classes and nation building, future teachers internalized a new ethos that clashed with the depressed realities of their social status and low pay. Consequently they were less willing to accept traditional arrangements of dependence on local community and clergy that had become codified (literally in some contracts of appointment) when their occupation had been defined as a craft. Steady salary increases in the second half of the nineteenth century freed many teachers of the need to accept subsidiary employment that increasingly was perceived as professionally demeaning, in particular the post of lay assistant to the clergy.

From France to Russia teachers' professional self-image was powerfully shaped by conflicts with the clergy, who tried to maintain the dominant position churches had previously held in schooling and who perceived teachers as potential rival figures of authority in the community. Teachers' professional identities included a strong commitment to laicity and a programmatic endorsement of secular education. Professionalization was defined in terms of emancipation from traditional subservience to the clergy, which teachers increasingly considered suffocating and demeaning. Their grievances involved some teachers in protests during the 1848 revolutions, and these resentments continued to smolder in the 1850s, when governments briefly conceded more influence to churches as an antidote to radicalism. In Germany salary increases helped free teachers from dependence. When German teachers created the most powerful professional associations in Europe in the late nineteenth century, they lobbied forcefully for an end to the clergy's continued role in school inspection, further secularization of the curriculum, and introduction of a ladder system that would permit easier access to secondary and higher education for lower-class children. Throughout Germany clerics continued to play a pervasive role in school inspection into the twentieth century. Teachers deeply resented this vestige of their former subservience, and German teachers' associations lobbied forcefully, but until the Weimar period unsuccessfully, for the removal of pastors and priests from the classrooms of the largely religiously segregated schools.

In France conflict between teachers and priests began in the 1830s, when the church attempted to regain its previous authority over schooling and teachers began to acquire a new sense of identity and competence through state-controlled training, certification, and inspection. Something similar began to occur in Russia at the very end of the century. There an overpopulated clerical estate ensured a ready supply of sacristans and deacons to assist priests, and the teacher-cleric relationship never attained the formal subordination that it did in the West. Nevertheless, Orthodox priests resented teachers' influence, and the competition between church schools and those established by zemstvos heightened tensions at the turn of the century. Well-publicized cases of cleric-inspired denunciations of teachers led to dismissals by police and inspectors. Moreover teachers complained that priests often failed to fulfill their obligation to teach the mandatory catechism classes with the result that teachers had to perform this function because pupils were examined in this subject.

Most historians agree that the price of teachers' emancipation was that in many countries teachers became lower-level bureaucrats by the close of the nineteenth century, never attaining the autonomy possessed by the so-called free or full professions. But with support by European states, teachers gradually achieved the status of lower-level or semiprofessionals, a status reinforced by standardized training, examination, improved pay, and full-time commitment. While state policy and teachers' own aspirations were central to this process, changes in popular attitudes toward schooling played an important role. As lower-class parents accepted regular attendance and longer terms of instruction for their children, they were more receptive to teaching as a full-time occupation deserving of respect.

TEACHERS AND THE COMMUNITY

In the long run two developments proved essential to improving teachers' social status in the communities where they served: popular acceptance of the utility of regular schooling for children and attenuation of the financial control—tyranny in teachers' eyes—that local communities had originally exercised. Teachers' authority in the community increased with their independence and with the respectability of middle-class standards of dress and behavior, which states, parents, and teachers themselves had all come to expect of the profession.

However, this does not mean that teachers isolated themselves from community affairs. In villages throughout Europe teachers pursued a clear strategy of transforming themselves into local notables by providing a range of extracurricular services that were vital to rural folk increasingly confronted with the broader world of bureaucracy, markets, and information. In rural France, where male teachers took advantage of salary improvements to abandon the demeaning post of lay cleric, they eagerly accepted the post of town clerk (or secretary to the mayor). Since it placed them at the strategic point where the village interacted with the official world outside, that position considerably raised teachers' prestige and influence. By 1884 over twenty-five thousand teachers held this post (almost 70 percent of teachers and nearly all male teachers in village schools). In France the Third Republic encouraged such activity, and teachers, men and women, helped organize cooperatives, clubs, and countless other village associations. Many sponsored adult classes in a conscious attempt to enhance their own prestige along with that of learning. As notables, they played an important role in sustaining the homefront during the final years of World War I, and the same was doubtless true in other countries. In the well-documented case of France, teaching had become by the turn of the century a materially secure, prestigious semiprofession, offering an avenue of social mobility, or at least status preservation, for the children of farmers, artisans, minor officials, and teachers, a reality reflected in declining rates of turnover and increasing length of service.

In Russia, by contrast, the government remained suspicious of teachers who attempted to carve out a wider role in peasant communities. Official memories of the participation of a minority of teachers in the revolution of 1905 were still fresh, conservative fears about the corrosive effects of schooling and teachers on the rural order were still salient fifty years after they had waned in western and central Europe, and teachers had yet to achieve the gains in professional association won by their colleagues in the West.

THE EXPANSION AND FEMINIZATION OF TEACHING

Nearly everywhere in Europe the number of teachers increased dramatically during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. In England and Wales the number of primary schoolteachers increased three times between 1870 and 1880, from 13,729 to 41,426. By 1910 there were 161,804 teachers, ten times the number in 1870, the year Parliament passed the first Education Act that made the British state a substantial actor in the nation's schools. At that date teachers comprised less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the workforce, with eighty-nine teachers for every thousand workers, but by 1911 they accounted for nearly 9 percent. In Italy normal schools enrolled 6,000 students in 1870–1871, 14,200 in 1881–1882, and 20,000 by 1901. In the following decade the number of teachers-in-training more than doubled, with 50,000 attending normal schools by 1912. As was true in other countries, the expansion of schooling and the teaching profession in Italy reflected the liberal government's commitment to nation building, summed up in Massimo d'Azeglio's famous appeal, "Now that we have made Italy, we must make Italians." In Russia the prewar years saw a particularly dramatic expansion of the teaching profession from 105,355 teachers in ministry schools in 1910 to 146,032 in 1914, an increase of nearly 40 percent in in four years. Most of this expansion occurred in rural areas, where teachers constituted the most numerous representatives of an educated intelligentsia, much more visible than doctors and other medical professionals. In terms of education and potential authority, only the village priest rivaled the teacher.

Young men continued to enter the profession, but by the turn of the century new teachers were more likely to be women. Assumptions about gender roles helped legitimize the seemingly inexorable process of feminization. Some educators argued that women's nurturing role made them natural teachers, particularly in dealing with the tender emotions of children. But feminization was primarily a function of economics. In a period of rapid industrialization and state expansion, men with educations comparable to teachers and even some with normal school degrees were attracted to better-paying and physically less isolated clerical positions in administration and business. Educated women had fewer options and would accept lower salaries. Nearly everywhere before World War I, pay scales for women teachers were considerably lower than those for men. Nevertheless, teaching was more attractive to women than domestic, factory, or agricultural labor. In France only the postal service offered comparable civil service careers to women. Inevitably, with the rapid expansion of school systems and the increase in the number of teachers during the final decades of the nineteenth century, women came to dominate the profession in most countries. Teaching was perceived as a woman's occupation, which was a factor in its semiprofessional status.

The process of feminization was universal but uneven. In England, Wales, Italy, and Russia, as in North America, by the early twentieth century 60 to 70 percent of teachers were women. In France the proportions were closer to fifty-fifty, and the number of lay women teachers did not surpass that of men until 1909, with 58,396 women. In Germany, however, teaching earlier became a full-time profession, and the state moved aggressively after unification to improve salaries and pensions and to grant teachers the perquisites of civil service ranking and the privilege of serving as reserve officers in the army. There the profession remained overwhemingly male. Only 21 percent of elementary teachers in Germany were female on the eve of World War I, but the female proportion within the profession was increasing.

The effects of feminization are more difficult to gauge than the numbers. When women first entered the profession, some men resented them as competitors who would work for less and lower the profession's status. In France, where lay women began to move into the profession in the 1880s, male-dominated associations, the Amicales, at first prohibited women members. However, the fact that teachers, whether men or women, faced similar problems and similar enemies fostered solidarity and cooperation. In France conservative and clerical attacks on secular education and lay teachers during the Dreyfus affair induced men to accept women teachers as allies. In 1909 the national Amicale congress endorsed equal pay for women teachers, which was achieved in 1920. Men continued to dominate leadership posts in professional associations, but women established a more visible presence. In Russia, where teachers faced considerable problems of cultural isolation, clerical rivalry, and less support from the government, cooperation across the sexual divide eventually prevailed. The critical difference was that in Russia teachers found less support from the state, which shared some of the same concerns that the church and conservatives had concerning teachers' role.

Contrary to popular assumptions, most women entered teaching to pursue a career, not for a temporary interlude before marriage. In France by 1900 more than half of the women teachers had served for over fifteen years. Normal school graduates signed a ten-year contract to teach, and if they resigned early they had to repay the cost of training. More than half had married and continued to teach. Marriage was encouraged by French education officials, who wanted female teachers, like their male counterparts, to civilize peasants and workers and transform them into citizens. Married women teachers in particular would help socialize girls by inculcating middle-class domestic norms of hygiene and child care.

In the early decades of women entering the profession, they often faced difficulty winning popular acceptance, and many, particularly single women, lived lonely, isolated lives. Some contemporaries believed that feminization lowered the status of teaching, and this probably inhibited some men from entering the profession. Feminization also coincided with the increased subordination of teachers within educational bureaucracies, although the relationship was complex. Some scholars have argued that school administrators enforced marriage bans for women teachers as a way to prevent them from advancing to positions of authority and to keep salaries down. However, these bans were far from universal. Nevertheless, it is clear that from Great Britain to Russia men held positions of power and authority, such as principals and inspectors in the larger urban schools. Everywhere the powerful post of state school inspector, a figure of awesome authority over teachers' professional lives and often over their private lives, was held by men. Isolated but well-publicized cases of sexual harassment of teachers by inspectors underscored the fact that, while teaching was becoming increasingly feminized, power in the educational bureaucracies of European states remained firmly in male hands. In the Third Republic in France the inspectorate was opened to women, but their entry was slow. Evidence also shows that the first generation of women teachers faced more difficulty than men in gaining acceptance and authority in local, particularly rural, communities. This was true in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when a large percentage of men teachers also held the influential position of secretary to the mayor. Women did not hold this post, nor could they vote. In Russia men were more involved in community affairs, whether in the rural cooperatives that grew dramatically in the early 1900s or in rural politics during moments of upheaval like the revolution of 1905–1906.

TEACHERS, POLITICS, AND PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION

In many ways teaching was the most politically sensitive of the professions. Governments and elites recruited and trained teachers to integrate the masses into the evolving social and political order. At the same time they remained wary of teachers' potential to disrupt that order. Given teachers' position as marginal and often poverty-stricken intellectuals whose work placed them in close contact with peasants and workers, official attitudes toward the emerging profession were often ambivalent, and they fluctuated over time.

In Germany, after the 1848 revolution, official discourse characterized the schoolteacher as a subversive pariah, but a mere twenty years later Otto von Bismarck and other architects of German unification extolled the Prussian teacher as the real victor at the Battles of Königgrätz and Sedan. Nevertheless, officials remained wary of teachers' loyalty in subsequent decades, even as they moved aggressively to meet teachers' professional goals to inculcate that loyalty. The same official suspicion existed in France, at least until the 1880s, when the Third Republic embraced lay teachers, men and women, as republican missionaries—the famous "black hussars"—who would civilize the peasantry and combat clerical and conservative political influence in the countryside. However, official suspicion then turned against the large numbers of women in religious teaching orders who still educated a large percentage of children, especially girls, in French primary schools. The Russian government remained extremely suspicious of teachers' potential to radicalize the masses until the very end of the tsarist regime. An activist minority of teachers had been involved in revolutionary movements from the 1870s through the revolution of 1905. Because of financial constraints and the nature of the Russian autocracy, the government was never willing to adequately meet Russian teachers' demands for the material security, emancipation from local interests, or rights of professional association won by their colleagues in the West. In addition the Russian state failed to achieve the kind of monopoly over teacher training established elsewhere. Active opposition by teachers to the existing order was much less pronounced in western and central Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. However, teachers were not completely coopted by governments, and they were unable to shape state initiatives when these were viewed as inimical to their professional goals.

Imperial Germany provides a case in point. In 1889 Emperor William II issued a cabinet order that called upon teachers to combat the socialist movement in the classroom. Historians of German education once argued that teachers, coopted by civil service status, higher pay and pensions, and privileges like the coveted right to serve as reserve officers in the army, became subalterns, excessively subservient to the state, and helped indoctrinate pupils with a chauvinistic, antidemocratic ethos that contributed to Germany's political course during the twentieth century. Research has shown, however, that while German teachers were patriotic like most teachers elsewhere by World War I, they resisted the call to struggle against the Social Democrats out of concern about alienating working-class parents. Instead, through their powerful national teachers' association of 125,000 members, they supported a program of education reform designed to democratize schooling (the ladder system), secularize the curriculum, and remove clerics from their traditional role in school inspection.

CONCLUSION

With the spread of schooling in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, teaching became one of the most numerous professions. With support from states and growing popular acceptance of schooling, teachers' status changed dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century. While some teachers continued to perform supplemental work for economic or tactical reasons, like the secretary to the mayor in France, the prevailing trend was toward full-time teaching. Improved and standardized qualifications, relative material security, and emancipation from local control enhanced teachers' social and professional status. In a world where states and masses placed increased value on literacy and basic schooling, teaching offered the prospect of social mobility for the ambitious children of the lower class. However, this improvement often came at the the price of incorporation into the lower rungs of the state bureaucracy, and teachers consequently enjoyed considerably less autonomy than higher-status professions. In addition and paradoxically, the very success and spread of schooling ensured that teaching remained a semiprofession. With the rise of mass education, the services provided by teachers lost whatever mystique or esoteric quality they previously had. In contrast to doctors or lawyers, the knowledge and skills teachers possessed were generally within the competency of all who passed through the schools.

See alsoThe Liberal State (volume 2);Church and Society (in this volume); and other articles in this section.

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