ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I begin by explaining my use of the terms, ‘politics and teachers’, in relation to each other and in particular with regard to the study of teachers’ work as work, the creation of policy related to the conditions and contexts of work and the right of teachers to be involved in the creation and maintenance of that policy. Secondly, I describe the early formation in the modern period of a distinctive way of managing teachers, their work and their politics by their incorporation into the education system (using the ideas of Sydney Webb [1918]) and the management of their ‘independence’ under indirect rule. The consequence of these congruent processes was the paradox for the politics of teaching that teachers had to be non-political. Thirdly, I raise another related issue about teacher politics, which was the social danger the teaching workforce represented to the modern State. Even though this danger might be symbolic, it had consequences for the political relations between teachers and the State. The social danger of an organized teacher workforce wasn’t necessarily based on what teachers did, it was what they represented. However, while the danger might be symbolic, the means to deal with the collective of political teachers also included a method of policing the boundaries of teaching so that they became separated and coerced. Fourthly, I explore the continuing politics of teaching in the modern period as a war of position, based around the doubleedged ideology of professionalism, around school-work disputes and around images of the ‘good’ teacher. Finally, I want to look at a further and related aspect of the relations between the State and teachers. Each party had to win support politically over time, in periods of change. Teachers might work within teaching as part of their membership of new social movements. They work, in and outside of their unions, in a discrete public politics which involves the policies of the State and contemporary ideas about work, citizenship and society and which is affected by different periods in the development of the modern State.
