Teaching

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A conventional view of teaching holds that it requires no more than Mark Hopkins, a boy, and a log. Common sense tells us we may dispense with the log but that two people, not necessarily man and boy, are essential. Further, there must be an understanding between the two that one knows more about something than the other and should impart it. According to this view, the act of teaching is a simple process: it is to give or impart knowledge.

The conventional view provides us with a plausible model. It suggests popular notions of what may go wrong: poor teaching occurs when teachers have too little knowledge or too little skill to impart the knowledge they have. Yet the model is not satisfying. In referring only to the teacher, it neglects the interaction of teacher and pupil, and it fails to explain the universal, if intermittent, resistance of pupils, the hostility, sometimes alternating with admiration and love, so often directed at teachers.

For there is conflict in teaching; it is a tension-filled, chancy process. Resistance to teaching occurs among pupils who are able and anxious to learn; it occurs when teachers teach well. It is not confined to schools but frequently occurs in the informal teaching situations of everyday life, as everyone knows who has tried to teach a friend to drive a car.

We can approach understanding of one source of the conflict between teacher and pupil if we think of teaching as an attempt to change the pupil by introducing him to new ideas. In this model, teaching is an assault on the self, and resistance to it can be explained as unwillingness to upset one’s inner status quo. Plausible as it may seem, the model is nevertheless limited in application. It illuminates the rare case: the pupil sufficiently aware of the power of ideas to fear and combat them, the pupil with an eager and persuasive teacher of a subject full of ideas of the kind that open new worlds of understanding of self. It does not explain the much more common case of the forgetful, indifferent pupil who has a dull teacher of a dry subject. But it is probable that there is as much, if not more, conflict between teacher and pupil in the latter case than in the former. We need a model of teaching that fits all types of pupils, teachers, and subjects.

A conflict model of teaching . In every teaching situation, the teacher is, at least temporarily, the superior and his pupil the subordinate, a relationship we may express in prepositional form as follows: A (the superior) originates interaction for B (the subordinate), and B responds according to A’s wishes; more simply, A gives orders that B obeys (Homans 1950, p. 244). From the superior’s standpoint, this statement describes a situation in which his ability to control B’s response is unquestioned— an ideal not always attained. When control is uncertain, the ideal takes on the force of obligation: if A does not control B’s response, he should; as superior, it is his responsibility.

We can apply this conditional form of Homans’ proposition to teaching. As teacher, A originates interaction for B by imparting knowledge or directing him to it. At the same time, A accepts the obligation to see to it that B responds as he (A) wishes. In fulfilling his responsibility, A evaluates the correctness of B’s response and controls B’s behavior during the interaction sufficiently to make correct response possible. Essentially, A’s role is that of command and B’s of submission.

While not inevitable, conflict between teacher and pupil is predictable in this model (Waller [1932] 1961, p. 195). The absence, rather than the presence, of resistance requires explanation when one person seeks so much control over another. Teaching, in this model, is making the pupil learn; and a teacher’s task is one of so managing the conflict his efforts may provoke that submission is temporary and the pupil’s spirit unbroken.

Reduction of conflict. Our difficulties with teaching in everyday life suggest that subordination is indeed central to teaching. We feel most at ease when A’s status outside the teaching dyad is superior to B’s. If not always gladly, young people accept teaching from their elders, and neophytes take it from old hands. Subordination becomes an issue, however, when A is equal or inferior in status to B. In these circumstances, we use a variety of devices to mitigate conflict. Between friends, what is essentially a nonreciprocal relationship can be phrased, “I’ll teach you to swim, if you teach me to. . . .” Each takes responsibility for the other in this interaction, but not simultaneously. We depend on the promised reversal of role to sweeten subordination.

In more structured relationships, reciprocity may be impossible. Situations arise in which one of two persons equal in rank knows something the other must know to carry on his work. When this happens, the latter may be induced to ask for help, so that the teacher seems less like a teacher because he does not originate the interaction. The word “teaching” is not used. Instead, one colleague “helps out” another or “lends a hand.” The helper may go out of his way to make clear that he considers himself superior in knowledge to his colleague solely on the matter at hand.

Teaching is inappropriate when B has very high status. Captains of ships are not teachable during command, or company presidents on matters of business. In fact, it is folk wisdom not to try to teach anyone his business, whatever his rank. When instruction is needed, high-ranking people employ a consultant on specific problems for which he is asked to furnish solutions to be tried out only after he has gone. Deprived of control over his pupil’s learning and of opportunity to evaluate it, the consultant is less threatening to the man who hires him, but he leaves the scene with an uncomfortable sense of unfulfilled responsibility.

Not using the word “teaching” when teaching is being done, inducing the pupil to ask for it, reciprocity of role, and strict limitation of the area of expertise are devices commonly used to avoid the conflict inherent in teaching. Yet uneasiness, if not hostility, remains. Friend, consultant, and helper still feel responsible for their pupil’s response and may try to control it. Learners must hide from themselves the knowledge that even in such a truncated relationship they may have revealed themselves incapable of correct response. One can send away the teacher but not before he has taken one’s measure.

School and classroom

The devices that mitigate conflict between teacher and pupil in everyday life are seldom used (although they may be play-acted) in the schoolroom. The teacher’s status as an adult makes reciprocity of role unthinkable, since he cannot be put in the position of child-pupil. In so-called democratic teaching methods, interaction may seem to originate with the pupil, but all except the youngest sense the teacher’s guiding hand and frequently resent the pretense (Seeley et al. 1956, p. 271).

A pupil may take the initiative by asking for help with a problem, so that the teacher becomes a tutor-consultant who acts as if both he and the pupil had to satisfy outside examiners. But this form of interaction is necessarily infrequent; no matter what efforts school and teachers make to teach individuals, much of the day continues in the lockstep the school’s economy of time and space requires. The teacher talks to all his pupils as a unit; he assigns lessons and gives examinations to the group. If there are outside examiners, he does his own testing and grading first. It is only at the end of a schooling sequence, when pupils move on to another system, that teacher and class join efforts to pass examinations.

Authority of the teacher . In everyday teaching situations, we minimize potential conflict by limiting the teacher’s power or pretending it does not exist. Schools do the opposite. They support and legitimate his authority in a number of ways. The teacher has the advantage of his own ground—the self-contained unit of the classroom and the enclosing walls of the school building, which cut the pupil off from the rest of his world. The teacher has dependable allies in other teachers, the school administration, and the state. His methods of control and evaluation (discipline and grading) receive institutional support in the record keeping of the administration. While there may be misunderstandings among these allies of the teacher and vulnerability to outside pressures, they have the advantage of being adults dealing with children. They maintain a continuing order in which the pupil is always subject to the authority of a teacher, in a school the law requires him to attend.

The school also bolsters the teacher’s authority by legitimating his claims to knowledge. It assures the community that its teachers have academic degrees and experience. Furthermore, the schoolteacher deals with knowledge systems that have an objective character intrinsically separate from the person of both the teacher and the pupil (Simmel 1950, p. 132). Teacher and pupil do not simply agree, as in informal teaching, that the teacher has superior knowledge; it is a matter of public consensus that he does.

With so many allies and so much support of his authority, the teacher’s position seems unassailable. If there is to be some form of conflict between him and his pupils, he must surely win. Pupils are not defenseless, however. Their parents may intercede, and the law usually forbids corporal punishment. In the classroom they have the great advantage of being many to the teacher’s one. Like any group, pupils can better their condition by acting together to solve common problems, and a united class provides a teacher with a formidable opponent.

In strictly run schools, however, where grades are of primary importance, the teacher often avoids conflict between himself and his pupils by encouraging conflict among the pupils themselves. He prevents pupils from joining in collective action against him by inducing them to compete with each other in classwork. He has each pupil recite to him rather than to the class and upholds the fiction that learning takes place legitimately only within the dyad of teacher and pupil. When a teacher structures interaction in the classroom in this way, pupils are very aware that they offer the same product to a teacher whose chief role is that of evaluator of products. But, as Marshall ([1963] 1965, pp. 181-183) notes, similarity need not divide; competitors often become partners. When they do, a new form of conflict develops, in which pupils unite to bargain with the teacher about the terms of their cooperation with him. In modern egalitarian societies, where teachers often feel uncomfortable in an authoritarian role and deplore competition for grades, bargaining is probably the most frequent form of conflict between teacher and pupils.

Bargaining between teacher and pupils . The fact that the school’s economy requires the teacher to treat his class as a unit in many, if not all, respects undoubtedly facilitates the development of consensus and collective action on the part of pupils or, as it has elsewhere been called, “student culture” (Becker et al. 1961, pp. 435-437). The term designates a subtle use of the businessman’s device of limiting the area of the teacher’s expertise. This student action is a drive for a modicum of autonomy expressed in bargaining with the teacher about matters he does not conventionally define as teaching but for which he nevertheless feels responsible: control of the pupil’s behavior during learning.

By listening carefully to what a teacher says he wants in class and comparing among themselves what grades or comments he gives for what kinds of work, and by “trying things on” (mass shoelace tying, for instance) in the early days of a school term, a class may reach a consensus about its teacher’s standards, both academic and disciplinary. It then transforms what the teacher says and does into rules for him to follow. He must not change these rules the class makes for him, and he must apply them to all pupils.

It does not matter much how high a teacher sets standards of quiet, neatness of work, or promptness, although there will be protests if his standards are out of line with those of other teachers. What does matter is consistency of application. In the eyes of his pupils, this is the teacher’s part of the bargain. If it is not kept, he can expect trouble. Teachers who fail to understand the basic premise —“We will behave properly, if you behave properly”—find themselves continually engaged in disciplining pupils rather than imparting knowledge.

Some of the rules of the bargain pupils make with a teacher are in that gray area continually subject to negotiation—degrees of neatness or quietness, for example. Other rules are clear-cut: a teacher may not give a test on things not in the text or on matters not covered in class. Rules vary from classroom to classroom and from one school to another, of course, and with the age and sophistication of pupils. But everywhere the largely unspoken bargain his pupils make with him constrains the teacher’s behavior whether he knows it or not.

Pupils have effective sanctions which they use to reward and punish teachers who fail to live up to the bargain, sanctions few teachers can withstand. On one day, when a visitor comes, they delight the teacher with exemplary behavior; on the next, they generate an uproar in the classroom that is loud enough to echo in the ears of the principal, the parents, and the entire community. Dependent on his pupils’ good will and cooperation, the teacher soon accedes to the bargaining practices of the class, often entering the game on his own behalf. He says, in effect, “If you will be quiet, you may have more time for the test”; by this action he not only recognizes and thus strengthens the collectivity but also tolerates illicit academic practice in order to secure discipline (Blau [1955] 1963, pp. 215-217).

The bargain also defines the teacher’s jurisdiction. Pupils agree that in his classroom the teacher may legitimately control the academic (lessons and tests), attempt to control the quasi-academic (note passing and pencil sharpening), and justly refer the nonacademic (dress and morals) to the more encompassing authority of the principal. In pupils’ eyes, however, it is always the academic that legitimizes a teacher’s control. Hallways, washrooms, and yards are spatially removed from books and study; the teacher controls them as he can.

The teacher is not likely to see the logic of these distinctions. He knows that if he is to control one pupil’s academic response in the classroom, control of the whole class is a prerequisite, and that control of the class depends upon the discipline of adjacent rooms and hallways. The school administration, pursuing its bureaucratic course, also finds behavior unrelated to the academic threatening to the smooth functioning of the school and to its reputation. As a consequence, the dress, manners, and morals (sometimes the families of pupils in the case of less privileged groups) become areas of expertise and attempted control. In some schools, teachers and administration rationalize the extension by asserting responsibility, difficult to realize, over the “whole child.” It often is in such apparently unimportant matters as proper dress that bargaining between teacher and pupils breaks down, opening the way to various forms of a third form of conflict—revolt.

Whatever its form—competition among pupils that the teacher must carefully perpetuate, bargaining in which he must share, or revolts he must put down—conflict is difficult for the teacher who clings to the conventional idea that his sole function is one of imparting knowledge. If he thinks of himself as a superior controlling the behavior of many unruly subordinates, he may eventually come to enjoy the battle.

Training institutions for teachers

Teachers’ colleges and university schools of education supply the school system with employees and share with it the long-range goal of educating the young. In view of this close relationship, we might expect training institutions to prepare teachers for conflict with pupils, but they do not. Instead, they follow the conventional model with which we began: to teach is to impart or offer knowledge. Would-be teachers learn subject matter and techniques of teaching. They take courses in test construction and interpretation, but testing is not recognized as a device for controlling pupils, and discipline (control of a collectivity) is seldom considered a proper subject of instruction. Offhand, such disjunction between the everyday work of an occupation and the training one receives for it seems extraordinary. Yet wherever training is separated from practice (which is to say, wherever there are schools), we find a similar situation. Most schools teach much that is never used and fail to teach what is.

We may explain the disjunction by referring to the situational perspectives (sets of beliefs and actions) of the various groups in the training institution that together make up its culture. People in both the schools and the training institutions for teachers develop ways of acting, goals, and interests in response to the particular problems posed by their situation (Becker et al. 1961, pp. 34-37). Schools and teachers’ colleges are both part of the larger hierarchy of educational institutions devoted to a common goal, but their immediate situations differ.

While school people must deal with local politics, neighborhoods (good and bad), parents, and other interest groups, teachers’ colleges exist in an academic setting different in situational imperatives and constraints. Theirs is the world of colleges and universities so apt to grant prestige, with all its privileges, largely to the scholarly disciplines. Since the conventional model of teaching emphasizes knowledge, it fits the academic world better than the conflict model with its insistence on social skills. Faculties of education may be “school-bred” —many institutions require professors to have taught in the public schools (Hughes 1963a, p. 152)—but the trend in such faculties over the years is toward a looser tie with the schools. Set apart on his campus with his higher pay and status, the teacher of teachers loses touch with teachers of children. His institution may formally reflect the organization of the school system by its division into special, elementary, and high school programs, and state licensing regulations may set the sequence of students’ courses; but these articulating devices tend more to restrict innovation by both training school and student than to bring future teachers closer to the conflict central to teaching.

Recruiting . The disjunction of training and work, which prevents the transmission of usefully exact knowledge of what to expect in an actual teaching situation, undoubtedly helps the school system to recruit young teachers. It is possible to fill teaching jobs even under conditions of shortage, but the schools want to do more than fill them. Like other service institutions and businesses, they want recruits of high ability committed to a lifetime career. In a word, they want professionals.

Unfortunately, students of the highest ability seldom enter training institutions for teachers (Vertein 1961), and not all graduates teach (Osborn & Maul 1961). There are excellent reasons for this. Of the proud old callings, teaching requires the least formal education and consequently the least investment of time, money, and energy. The school of education provides a relatively un-specific college program that can do no harm. To enter training is in no sense a commitment to a career. For would-be athletes, musicians, and artists uncertain of success as performers and for women whose first choice of career is marriage, a degree in education is a form of occupational insurance.

Although teaching is highly visible to children early in their lives, the exposure is not likely to attract them to the occupation. The teacher is too much of a daily antagonist to generate, for example, the charisma of the physician who comes to help the family in time of trouble. For children of manual workers, teaching may carry prestige; but for those of higher social origins, it is more likely to seem a hard life for the reward. As a woman’s occupation, it also bears the stigma (for both sexes) of woman’s low status in comparison with men; yet it is not feminine enough, except at the nursery level, to attract women strongly.

People who do enter teaching discover that in comparison with other occupations it is startlingly lacking in the auxiliary rewards that facilitate commitment (Becker 1960). Industry and business offer promotion to more responsible positions, while school teaching offers only increases in pay and trivial seniority privileges. Teachers leave the classroom, of course, to become specialists or administrators; but as long they continue to teach, there is little opportunity for the more-than-local influence possible in other professions through publication, lecturing, and consultation.

Although teachers deal with people rather than with things (an ancient status distinction), the people they deal with are minors. They miss the rewards, psychological and political, of serving people of high status and power. Their daily work is often programmed by state departments of educacation; nonteachers supervise and direct them in ways which make the autonomy prized by traditional professionals and entrepreneurs impossible. Under such conditions, we should not be surprised that the recruiting of committed professionals is difficult.

Career and profession

Once started on a teaching career, the disjunction between their preparation and actuality in the schools often hits teachers hard. Faced as they are each day with hostile children interminably bargaining for greater autonomy, we may wonder why any of them continue. In the absence of research, we can only speculate, but it is probable that many people find themselves committed to teaching because a first-choice career fails them. The desired marriage or acceptance in some world of athletics, literature, or art never materializes. Teachers may also commit themselves unwittingly because the occupation permits other involvements. For a married man, low pay may necessitate moonlighting, and this second job, fitted to a teaching schedule, may become so rewarding that he continues to teach. Married women who find that teaching fits well with household and child-rearing duties may also continue in teaching.

There is, in addition, the security of tenure and, frequently, happiness in inertia. School tasks repeat and repeat; year after year the round is the same. One may become so marked by immersion in the world of a slum school that one feels unfitted for any other (Becker 1952, p. 474). Responsibility to individuals is lessened by the constant turnover of pupils who sit in one’s class for a year and are gone. In time, bargaining for control of a class may become enjoyable. Some of the very things about teaching that discourage neophytes may keep veterans at it (Geer 1966).

Teachers as professionals . More positively, people may commit themselves to teaching because it is, in many respects, a profession. Teachers cannot claim the separate identity given by control of an esoteric body of knowledge (Hughes 1963b, p. 657), but they do have the esoteric skills of the classroom. They do not have professional societies strong enough to protect them from the incursions of the community, parents, and experts on education outside the school system, but it is usually in the interest of the principal to protect them (Becker 1953, pp. 133-139). They are supervised, but there is still something left of the lonely eminence of the classroom. Visibility of performance is low; and few people believe we have learned as yet how to measure teaching ability (Brim 1958).

In the community, teaching seems to retain some of the more unpleasant aspects of a profession. There are remnants of the expectation that teachers should be models of propriety for the young; even adults are sometimes embarrassed in their exacting presence. The public objects to demands for higher pay because teachers live on taxpayers’ money. They ought to serve the community gladly.

Teachers themselves display ambiguity about their status by having unions as well as professional societies. The latter have little control (although they increasingly attempt it) over ethics, recruiting, training, or legislation affecting teachers. They have not yet decided whether school administrators and specialists should be included in their associations as “teachers” or kept out as bosses and rivals. Unions help teachers to fight for higher pay and against the encroachments of duties in schoolyards, lunchrooms, and toilets. But they are more apt to lower that prestige so important to a marginal profession than to heighten it.

Teachers feel they have a poor public image and inadequate public appreciation, but for many teaching is a step up in social class and therefore in respect. Large city systems help teachers to get the additional education required for specialization and raises in pay. Opportunity to transfer to the pleas-anter working conditions in middle-class schools comes with seniority (Becker 1953). For men, schoolteaching may be a stopgap, if no longer a stepping-stone on the way to more prestigious careers. For women, it can be a satisfying and even creative occupation that intrudes less than others upon a husband and children.

Teachers are not professionals in the usual sense. They do not have clients who choose them, terminate the relationship, or bring to it the immediate need of help that tempers the client’s subordination to the physician or lawyer. In a broader sense, they are professionals with the society for client. We cannot do without their transmission, however imperfect, of its heritage. It is even probable that society would be quite different had children no opportunity to engage in conflict with their superior, the teacher, and hence no opportunity to learn early something of the strength that collective action brings to subordinates.

Blanche Geer

[See alsoAdult Education; Education; EducationalPsychology; Universities.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Becker, Howard S. et al. 1961 Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Univ. of Chicago Press.

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Brim, Orville G. 1958 Sociology and the Field of Education. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Floud, Jean; and Scott, W. 1961 Recruitment to Teaching in England and Wales. Pages 527-544 in A. H. Halsey, Jean Floud, and C. Arnold Anderson (editors), Education, Economy, and Society: A Reader in the Sociology of Education. New York: Free Press.

Friedenberg, Edgar Z. 1965 Coming of Age in America. New York: Random House.

Geer, Blanche 1966 Notes on Occupational Commitment. School Review 74, no. 1:31-47.

Homans, George C. 1950 The Human Group. New York: Harcourt.

Hughes, Everett C. 1963a Is Education a Discipline? Pages 147-158 in John Walton and James L. Kuethe (editors), The Discipline of Education. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Hughes, Everett C. 1963b Professions. Daedalus 92: 655-668.

Kob, Janpeter (1958)1961 Definition of the Teacher’s Role. Pages 558-576 in A. H. Halsey, Jean Floud, and C. Arnold Anderson (editors), Education, Economy, and Society: A Reader in the Sociology of Education. New York: Free Press. ? This article is abridged and translated from Janpeter Kob’s Das soziale Berufsbewusstsein des Lehrers der hoheren Schule.

Marshall, Thomas H. (1963)1964 Ciass, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. ? Essays first published in book form as Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays. A paperback edition was published in 1965.

Mason, Ward S. 1961 The Beginning Teacher; Status and Career Orientations: Final Report on the Survey of New Teachers in the Public Schools 1956-57. U.S. Office of Education, Circular No. 664. Washington: U.S. Office of Education.

Osborn, W. W.; and Maul, R. C. 1961 New Emphasis Needed in Teacher Recruitment. Midland Schools 75: 20-21.

Parsons, Talcott (1959) 1961 The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society. Pages 434-455 in A. H. Halsey, Jean Floud, and C. Arnold Anderson (editors), Education Economy and Society: A Reader in the Sociology of Education. New York: Free Press. ? First published in the Harvard Educational Review.

Seeley, John R. et al. 1956 Crestwood Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life. New York: Basic Books.

Simmel, GeorgThe Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950. ? See especially pages 118-144 on “The Isolated Individual .and the Dyad.”

Snider, G. R.; and Long, D. 1961 Are Teacher Education Programs Attracting Academically Able Students? Journal of Teacher Education 12:407-411.

Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1965 Rebellion in a High School. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Vertein, Lester D. 1961 A Study of the Personal-Social and Intellectual Characteristics of a Group of State College Students Preparing to Teach. Journal of Experimental Education 30:159-192.

Waller, Willard W. (1932) 1961 The Sociology of Teaching. New York: Russell.