ABSTRACT
Pathetic and monstrous teachers parade through popular culture and seem to reflect a deep-seated social mistrust of the profession. The history of the teaching profession in the UK may help to explain why teachers are regarded with such suspicion. Teaching emerged late as a profession and has not shared the status of traditional ‘gentlemen’s professions’: the law, the Church and the armed services. The schoolmaster’s role from the sixteenth century onwards was often taken by the less educated clergy unable to secure a parish living, or by lectors, low-paid lay readers employed by the Church (O’Day, 1982). Some schoolteachers combined their low-paid role with the humble job of parish clerk. The national schools used unqualified older children to teach younger pupils. Although the headteachers of the great endowed grammar schools had some standing in society, and despite attempts from the late sixteenth century onwards to provide training and education for some teachers, teaching in general remained poorly paid and of low status. Moreover, teaching, particularly of younger children, has often been the preserve of women and has therefore acquired the lower status associated with female work. It is concomitant with childminding and care work, particularly in dame and elementary schools, rather than with intellectual activity. As Miller (1996, p. 2) notes, women’s qualification for the kinds of work they were expected to do ‘usually rested on what they were thought to know and be able to do “naturally”’. This has led to many negative perceptions of teachers, including the assumption that those of young children are ‘motherly but/and brainless’ (ibid., p. 13).
