ABSTRACT
Politically, teachers’ collective ambitions were focused principally through the agency of the NUT which, from its inception, had directed its efforts ‘towards “professional status” and “professional self-government”’.1 Most elementary teachers were NUT members and characteristically looked to the organisation with pride and expectation. But, at the same time, the union was often regarded pragmatically, as a powerful institutional defence in the event of individual problems or hardship. For the rest of the time, the union, like the politicians, could sometimes seem distant from the everyday concerns of classroom teachers, whose professional lives were typically framed by relentlessly local concerns. And it was within the context of their immediate local communities that teachers’ comparative perceptions of their status were most keenly felt.2 Some sense of this is conveyed in the lines of an article of 1908 entitled, ‘The Teacher in Social Life’:
A good deal has been written of late years about the status of the teacher in the social machine. Whilst it is generally admitted that he is gradually winning his way in public and social life to the position which his education and culture entitles him, there is without doubt huge barriers of prejudice and snobbery to be overcome in many quarters before he is appreciated at his real worth… ‘Last summer I stayed at a boarding-house at the seaside. The other boarders were a very pleasant set, and we all jogged along together nicely until… I happened to mention that I was a teacher in an elementary school. Immediately a constraint fell upon the company. One lady remembered that a “grievous” hurt had been inflicted on her boy by his teacher, and she launched forth such a diatribe against teachers in general, wrathfully glaring at me the while, that I felt most uncomfortable, and was glad when the dinner gong sounded. For the rest of my stay there was a marked difference in their attitude towards me… I do not know how to account for the fact that the teacher is too often unappreciated and, as politely as possible, shunned… Very few can credit how the teacher desires for a better understanding between himself and the rest of the world.’3
