ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some important dimensions of the teachers' perspectives on their work. It defines a teaching ideology as follows: A connected set of systematically related beliefs and ideas about what are felt to be the essential features of teaching. In Mrs Carpenter's view most of her children are thick and those who are not thick are disturbed. She shares the headmaster's general conception that the school should aim to compensate the children of the estate for their underprivileged home backgrounds. Mrs Lyons see her pupils as the products of largely unstable and uncultured backgrounds, with parents who are, in various combinations, irresponsible, incompetent, illiterate, clueless, uninterested and unappreciative of education, and who, as a result fail to prepare their children adequately for the experiences they will be offered in school. Instead of seeing children as deprived, maladjusted or disturbed, Mrs Buchanan sees them in the main as merely normal children who happen to come from working class backgrounds.
