ABSTRACT
This paper is an attempt to put together various strands of our work on teachers and our criticisms of existing work. Two principal directions have informed our work, a re-examination of teacher union history, and a re-examination of the concepts of professionalism and class as applied to teachers. In both cases we felt that the application of the concepts of professionalism and class analysis were inadequate, particularly where they categorized teachers as middle class professionals. The dominant sociological model had classified teachers as upwardly mobile, status seeking, new middle class members, and it seemed that more radical class analyses, to our dismay, echoed these conclusions, though using new approaches to professionalism derived from theories of the State and education, and neo-Marxist models of class. In both cases, the conclusion that teachers are middle class professionals had been reached by using the same historical evidence, the only differences were ideological, i.e. whether this was a Good or Bad Thing.
