What distinguishes teachers from other professions?

Teachers are front line civil servants who have two masters. As part of the ideological state apparatus they are contracted to deliver services and information (knowledge) vetted and sanctioned by the provincial government. The other master is the collective expectation of parents and students. The two masters live miles apart, spatially and figuratively but manage to exert pressure on the teacher.

If you get paid to teach in the public system then you don’t get paid to be a social worker, a coach, a truant officer, a computer technician and a parent. I also think that teachers get a bad rap in the press. I saw in Ontario, during the late 90s, a provincial Tory government vilify teachers in the press in what was clearly a union busting move. I don’t think the profession ever recovered.

Changing provincial governments makes teaching prone to drastic shifts in social programming. The plumbing industry doesn’t just make all plumbers learn new tools and abandon old ones as some kind of expensive experiment. Plumbers also don’t find out about decisions that affect their livelihood on the NTV News. Even the poor fish plant workers are called to the plant for the bad news.

Every parent has had some schooling and has had experiences with teachers. Can you ever out live them? I’ll bet a lot of parents bring bad memories of teachers to parent-teacher night. That doesn’t happen with bus drivers.

I think society put a lot of pressure on teachers without fully understanding what they do. In fact I’m not even sure yet what they do exactly. Classroom teachers are really at the end of a very large and politicized bureaucracy. Kids bring complicated environments to school with them every morning and teachers work for a system that they are publicly at war with. And they should have a strong union. And be well paid.