Modern Times?

Work, Professionalism and Citizenship in Teaching

Martin Lawn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135717650
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is an account of modern since the 1930s teaching. The book examines changes in teaching, past policy, and new policies introduced since the 1988 Education Act. In the context of market-led education replacing a public education system, the book looks at the impact of: the end of collective bargaining; the beginning of performance-related pay; and the recent emphasis on local school management and budgeting. It examines how these changes affect work and the professionalism of teachers. It also explores the impact of new kinds of work relations and skills in relation to changes in public service and the state.

1
The Politics of Teaching: Arguments Around Schoolwork

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 double-edged 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.

Politics and Work

I should begin by explaining my use of the term ‘political’ with regard to teachers’ beliefs and actions. I am interested in the way teachers act politically within education, acting within their teacher associations and making alliances with other groups or using a language of politics drawn from outside teaching to explore their roles, relations and work.¹ I am also interested in the way the modern State (using England and Wales as an example of the modern social democratic State in the twentieth century) deals with its workforce of teachers politically.

My argument about teachers and politics is based on the assumption that teachers have certain legitimate interests which flow out of their conditions of work: these interests seem to cross all kinds of societies if they employ a distinct group of people in a system of schooling. Teaching is organized in the modern State within particular forms of production, containing labour processes which determine many aspects of the content, skills, speed and work relations of teaching. This is not a socially neutral process to be excluded from our understanding of what teaching is; without a knowledge of the work context of teaching, their collective actions, in their various forms tend to make little sense or are excluded by nature of their lack of fit to the ‘real’ teaching. As the school is a site of struggle over the nature of teaching so is the history of the relations between the teachers and their employers; in one form or another this means the State in modern democratic societies. As has been argued before:

The study of teachers’ work as work should remain at the centre of research in this area. Like other forms of work, teaching should be properly served by a thorough study of its practices, struggles, lived experience and contradictions. Such an approach can range from studies of relations at work or the politics of skill control through to local and national policy-making involving organised teachers and their arguments on the nature of their industry. Most importantly, this study should be historical, recognising the movement of teachers in and out of teaching, and change in schools, in local authorities and in central and local educational policies. (Ozga and Lawn, 1988, p. 334)

Obviously the concerns of the collective of teachers are expressed within their organized deliberations, as is their relationship with their employer and management. Another feature of their work is their interest in the policies reflected in the schooling system, viz., its funding, expansion or decline, resources, current ideologies. Yet when teachers involve themselves in these policy areas it can be regarded by their local and national employers as a usurpation of ‘democratic’ processes or the management’s right to manage. Teachers can be seen as both main agents of social reproduction and low status operatives in the education system: this is the source of the contradiction which the phrase ‘the political nature of teaching’ describes. It is revealed in different ways, for example, in the gap between their actions and the way these actions are seen by the State. Alternatively, this tension in their work and their relations with the State is seen in contemporary English history within debates on professionalism, following a strike or an outbreak of moral panic or a political crisis. This tension may very well take different forms in other societies, it will always be there in one form or another. So politics means, in this context, the achievement of policy related to the conditions and contexts of work and the right to be involved in policy making.

However, this right to be involved in policy making leads into a further dimension of teacher politics. Teachers aren’t neutral in society or just defenders of their labour process. They may enter into teaching with a particular view of society and education, expressed within contemporary politics or social movements. They may develop a social/education project which leads them into a party or movement membership or into public alliances through their collective associations.

When a new group or class is beginning to move towards power, it must develop support and then win hegemony. In the twentieth century in particular, teachers are important, locally and nationally, as key members of the community and/or workers in a key public service. In this situation teachers are both the audience (the potential support) and often part of the new group attempting to win power and so are often politically involved. They may be divided sometimes by gender, race or school sector (elementary and secondary) in their attraction to this form of politics and its solutions to their problems.

In Nazi Germany, for example, many teachers moved into the Nazi party when they were faced with a deprofessionalization process which attacked their standard of living and their role as cultural agents. Using Nazi arguments about women and Jews in their profession, they tried to exclude them. Moreover, ‘they facilitated the erosion of Weimar democracy and turned youths towards illiberalism’ (Jarausch, 1985, p. 394). Yet in Britain, a decade earlier, the early rise of the Labour Party attracted teachers as voters or members, partly because it offered a new professionalism, a role in policy making and better pay.² Teachers may also be used by groups hoping to retain hegemony. Both the Left and the Right may view teachers as possible agents in the creation of a new society: in effect this always meant that certain groups of teachers were favoured, while others were expelled.

There are also permanent political tensions around the job of teaching which surface in times of crisis or when a radical government is organized. A statement like this one, made by a préfet Vichy France, can echo around any society:

The National Revolution will never really penetrate the countryside except through the teachers: if the Government has at its disposal a body of primary schoolteachers who are attached to the regime and who are the leading propagandists of its doctrine, the rural masses will be all but won over. (Kedward and Austin, 1985, p. 16)

The Vichy question is always there, expressed in different ways in different places, and its result is that teachers find out that trying to change their work or even just keeping quiet involves politics. If they aren’t trying to alter their work somebody else will: there is no stasis in the policy and management of education and teaching!

These elements, such as the language of confrontation or responsibility, the greater or lesser concern with social and political loyalty, the generally low status and high social responsibility, the changing idea of the State with its major restructuring or creation of new education sectors may vary at different times in different societies. What is consistent is the tension between teachers and their employers revealed in the working out of these elements and the social/education projects, expressed within party or movement membership. This is the source of the public politics of teaching.

Four examples reveal the complexity of this public politics. Firstly, Nikkyoso, the main teachers’ organization in Japan has a constitution which defines the teacher as a labourer albeit one who defends freedom, equal opportunity and proper government. This is a reflection of its opposition to the old imperial idea of the teacher and the influence of the post-war US administration. This idea, deeply embedded in its definition of its own unionized ‘good teachers’, has now to be persistently defended against a State which has moved conservatively to absorb the older ideas of the imperial State and to reject the Nikkyoso model. Interestingly, divisions occurred in the union when the Socialist Party faction opposed the suggestion (from the Communist Party) that the older definition of the teacher as part of a ‘sacred profession,’ associated with the proscription of strikes and political activity among teachers, should be re-introduced. So, again, professionalism is introduced and, in this case, is used to divide teachers and expressed within different party allegiances or factions which, presumably, follow a party line in the union. As one of its tactics for defence Nikkyoso sponsors a large annual research conference to further its foundation aims to establish a democratic education system and freedom of research and it tries to make alliances with groups of educationalists or citizens in the wider society (Ota, 1985).

Secondly, in Portugal the post-revolutionary teacher unions began to use the idea of professionalism to defend teachers from attacks by a Conservative Government wishing to ‘normalize’ schooling, though unions attached to either the Communist or Socialist/Social Democratic Party used this term in different ways. Indeed different unions organize themselves around key political and educational ideas which distinguish them from the other unions and take them nearer or farther away from the government. These ideas are fundamental and represent the teachers’ own views and involvement in a changing Portugal, allying them with other groups of workers in their associations (Stoer, 1985). Thirdly, the Maltese teacher union was influenced by the Catholic Church and opposed to the secular, independence leaders, the Labour Party (Darmanin, 1985). It found itself on political and cultural grounds unable to work with an independent Labour government which in turn, was unable to develop any strategies to win hegemony in education without teachers. Fourthly, in Jamaica, both teacher unions supported political independence, partly to increase their influence over policy-making and particularly to encourage the ‘nationalization’ of the elementary schools, though they did not affiliate directly to the new parties (Goulbourne, 1988). Anti-colonial independence movements may cause difficulties for unions created as a reflection of a colonial system of education.

The Making of Modern Teachers in Britain

In the modern period of state education in Britain, which in my view extends from the early 1920s to the late 1970s, a dependable corps of teachers was important to the State and its parties in the creation of a new, mass education system. This political concern with dependability translated itself into a practical philosophy of teacher management and an ideology of professionalism which shaped what teachers should or would be doing in their social behaviour and work relations. The modern British State, this century, was influenced, firstly, by a social democratic Labour Party which saw teachers as a crucial part of the government of education. This view of the essentially political nature of teaching has its roots in a paper by Sydney Webb, the Fabian theorist, written in 1918, at a time when popular education was expanding and the Labour Party was trying to encourage teachers to join. Webb (1918) argued that:

as systematic education is now more and more predominantly a Government function, and the bulk of the teaching profession is enrolled in one or other form of public service, we have necessarily to treat all educational projects as being, in the strictest sense of the word, politics, and as politics of the highest national importance… [The teaching profession] has consequently a claim to exercise a professional judgement, to formulate distinctive opinions upon its own and upon cognate services, and to enjoy its own appropriate share in the corporate government of its own working life. (Webb, 1918, p. 3)

In policy terms Webb (1918, pp. 4–6) argued that teachers should ‘advise and warn, to initiate and criticise, but not decide’. The claim to a political role for teachers then was based on a new claim to professional service for all the community, regardless of the ‘affluence or status of the persons in need’, and the means and organization for this to be achieved. It should instruct those who ‘move for educational reform what exactly it is that they should demand and press for’. This was an invitation to policy making by the front door and was the herald of a shift in state policy towards teachers and a bid to win teachers over to a new hegemony by Labour.

The second influence on the State in its relation to its teachers was the generation of a distinctive way of managing teachers, drawn from British colonial practice, which depended on the discreet use of power, control of finance and a dominant ideology of self-government. At the same time as Webb was developing his view on the essentially political nature of teaching, an important Minister of Education, Eustace Percy, argued with members of his own Conservative Party that the leftward drift of the teachers (in the 1920s) should not be met with an overt attack upon them by means of oaths of allegiance to the State, but that ‘the best safeguard against [the drift of teachers towards the labour party etc.] is to give teachers a sense of reasonable independence and not to subordinate them too much either to a central or to a local authority’ (Lawn, 1987a, p. 119). This idea of a ‘reasonable independence’ soon developed into a major political myth, coming to characterize the distinctly British, democratic way of governance, particularly in the education service, against totalitarian systems in the 1930s through to the 1960s. So, in effect, the social democratic incorporation of teachers into the management of the service and the conservative approach to managing education were homologous (although not entirely).

What is not evident in the statement by Webb is the other part of the bargain to be struck with teachers. If teaching was political, in the sense of being part of the corporate governance of the education system, then teachers had to become non-political, another paradox. This paradox is present in the theory of teaching professionalism expounded by Asher Tropp in the 1950s. Tropp argued that the teachers’ union was determinedly non-political but operated a series of alliances, discarded at the union’s convenience, with political parties or other significant groups to achieve its consistent aims. In his view, the profession of teaching:

was created by the state and in the [nineteenth century] the state was powerful enough to claim almost complete control over the teacher and to manipulate his [or her] status while at the same time disclaiming all responsibility towards him [or her]. Slowly, and as the result of prolonged effort, the organized profession has won free and has reached a position of self-government and independence. (Tropp, 1957, p. 4)

It may be summarized in this way: the more non-political the union was, the more power it was able to achieve or was given and as long as non-political meant non-party political, then, it was possible for the unions to talk of professionalism. Because of the new importance of education to the State, and of teachers within the management of the education system, the politics of teaching meant that teachers had to be non-political. The main question in England was how best this was to be achieved.

Policing the Boundary

One consequence of this modern definition of the teacher, as non-political and as an independent professional, is the way in which the world of teaching is defined so that any attempt to view the teacher outside the frame of the classroom is seen as unnatural. While this approach places teachers at the centre of the frame, it does so by reducing the teacher; they are shorn of the political, economic and cultural aspects of their work. This is not just a comment on the paucity of theoretical understandings about teachers, constantly separating these aspects from some version of the core teacher, it is a reflection of the dominant way in which teachers are managed. Paradoxically, one of the ways the political nature of teaching is dramatically acknowledged by the State is when there is a moral panic about the politics of teachers and what they may do and may not do in the classroom and in society. The history of teaching, prior to the 1920s, suggests that the fact that teachers existed as a group was enough for them to be regarded suspiciously by political leaders. It wasn’t what they did; it was what they represented. Historically, they were seen as a problem when they either grew in numbers so that the guardians of the State felt they were either (1) out of control and becoming too secular (i.e., disruptive of the natural order because of their existence!); (2) expressing their opinion about their work, however discreetly, in a way which their employers found challenging, or (3) using a language or taking actions which appeared to link them to a wider labour movement. What appears to count was the symbolic nature of their actions not the reality of the action itself. It was what their teachers appeared to be doing!

As their numbers grew, teachers were regarded collectively as a possible social danger. This perspective on teachers by their local employers (members of the business class, the landed class or the Church), expressed in local discussions on teachers’ pay, or by contemporary observers in the national press concerned about their political or social influence, should not be ignored. It is not that teachers’ actual political views or actions were extreme, in the main, but the fear their actions cause and the symbolic power they are seen as wielding to a State concerned with control or reproduction. While the political beliefs of some teachers were regarded as a reason not to employ them and these teachers were a numerical minority, their presence caused outrage among the ruling elite (Lawn, 1987a).

The modern response of an indirect control and professionalism was a sophisticated way of managing the social danger of the teaching workforce. To manage the collectivity of apolitical teachers, within this corral of a limited independence, it was necessary to police the boundaries. In this operation action was used against individuals and loudly publicized to ‘encourage the others’! The policing generally operated through teacher politics scares, involving bans and proscription as well as local campaigns against individual teachers and unions. At the same time the local and national press pursued individual teachers, while statements about professionalism were made in conferences or in public meetings by ministers to isolate radicals or freethinkers from the rest. Teachers were sacked in the 1920s for their beliefs, which in a time of teacher unemployment must have been very effective in reducing the idea of teacher politics to a question of private belief and quiet party membership. In the 1940s and early 1950s there was a ban on teacher membership of the Communist Party in parts of London.

In later years, it was union membership that was regarded as a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: The Politics of Teaching: Arguments Around Schoolwork
• 2: The Spur and the Bridle: Changing the Mode of Curriculum Control
• 3: Modernizing Professionalism; A Culture of Inquiry and the Teachers’ Labour League
• 4: The British Way and Purpose: The Spirit of the Age in Curriculum History
• 5: Social Constructions of Quality in Teaching
• 6: Encouraging License and Insolence in the Classroom: Imagining a Pedagogic Shift
• 7: A Determining Moment for Teaching: The Strike of 1985
• 8: Reform Dilemmas for the Union: Cultural Change and the Labour Process
• 9: The End of the Modern in Teaching?: Implications for Professionalism and Work
• 10: Second Guessing the Past: Organizing in the Market
• 11: Orderings and Disorderings: Questions About the Work of the Primary Head in the New Public/Private Mix
• Conclusion: A Synthetic Exit
• Bibliography