Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975)

Chapter 12 – Social and Academic Background of Teachers

This chapter examines the social background of English teachers and the impact this had on the ideology of the profession. English teachers have historically been drawn from working class and lower-middle classes with lower academic attainment and a restricted cultural knowledge. This has been unhelpful in promoting sufficient professional confidence and emphasised personal rather than academic excellence.

• Creative teaching:
  • Cecil Reddie at Abbotsholme
  • Caldwell Cook at Perse School
• Contributors to Newbolt Report seemed puzzled by inability of teachers to be transformed into independent-minded innovators by a changed set of regulations.
• Mathieson: “Comparison between schools like the Perse, upon whose methods the Newbolt Report bases many of its proposals, and those in the state system, exposed the two major difficulties hindering the development of English as a liberal subject: the absence of culture and scholarship in teachers; and the hostile conditions in the schools.”
• Low standards of teachers’ culture and academic attainment identified by Newbolt. Throughout 19th Century trained and untrained teachers had been recruited from lower or lower-middle classes.
• J. Kay-Shuttleworth – Report on Battersea (1843) – Mathieson: “In his view, the teacher’s role should be characterised by humility and religious zeal in the task of helping members of his own class.”
• Asher Tropp – The School Teachers (1957) – suggested that the Church’s role to ensure persistently low academic level of elementary school teaching in case it gave way to social ambition. To allay fears, the training colleges tried to intensify their students’ personal humility and sense of religious mission at the expense of academic excellence.
• Mathieson: “Recruited from the working classes, socially isolated and insecure, poorly educated by their colleges, and denied by the Newcastle Com­ mission such status which entry to the Inspectorate could have con­ferred, elementary school teachers were made to feel even more frustrated and inferior by the 1861 Revised Code. Although it ‘restored efficiency in the drudgery of teaching the 3 Rs … it ruth­lessly destroyed the culture which was slowly creeping into the schools of the people …. For the next twenty years they were sullenly to restrict themselves to mechanical task work, narrow in scope and low in standard.’ “
• The 1861 Revised Code produced an attitude unfavourable to experimentation in the classroom. It reduced teachers to the status of servants of school managers, permanently fearful of inspectors.
• Lecturers at training colleges were paid poorly and unable to progress to principalships (only to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge). Quotes Mosely saying of the forty students he had seen 10 were illterate.
• Quotes Matthew Arnold in 1855: “It is … sufficiently clear, that the teacher to whom you give only a drudge’s training, will do only a drudge’s work, and will do it in a drudge’s spirit; that in order to ensure good instruction from within narrow limits in a school, you must provide it with a master far superior to his scholars.”
• Newbolt Report complained of low standard of English acceptable for training colleges. (Also complains that students have no taste for reading and deficient in English!)
• Mathieson: “The substance of these and later complaints about the products of training colleges is central to any discussion about teachers’ profes­sional confidence. Underlying them is the assumption that, if only their training could be improved or, better still, if they could display exceptional personal gifts, they would be successful teachers of literature to working-class pupils. It is an assumption which ignores the indivisibility of liberal education, with its attendant social and academic confidence, and the leisured origins of university students.”
• Mathieson: “These complaints, which persistently draw attention to the students’ lack of culture, thus illustrate two main points. They show, of course, the severe discrepancy between the increasingly high expressed ideals for English teaching and the inadequacies of entrants to the colleges. More importantly, they suggest an explanation for educators’ tendency to call for personalities with outstanding qualities for the teaching of English. Since teaching in the state sector drew, and continues to draw, mainly from students from working-class backgrounds, with relatively poor academic qualifications, educators deeply committed to English called, and continue to call, for outstanding people to enter the schools. At this early point in the subject’s history they tended to reiterate hopes and wishes in the face of students’ lack of professional confidence.”
• Students enterteching were in general “strangers to… literature”. There were few cultivated graduates and possessed no sustaining cultural traditions of their own.”
• Concern for issues in society tended to obscure the problems facing the teachers.
• Newbolt Report identified that only 54% of teachers were certified. (Plus argues that certification was at a very low level.) Report claimed these teachers were failing their students and that it was training colleges’ fault. Only about one-third of teachers were equiped to teach English.
• Mathieson argues that many English teachers in state sector – due to low social origins – have lacked professional confidence necessary for imaginative and innovative work in the classroom. High-status graduates continue to view teaching contemptuously.
• Since 1902 creation of maintained secondary schools there has been an improvement in academic standards of students entering teaching.
• By 1928 70% of training college staff were graduates.
• Since 1944 63% of men and women training as teachers had at least one pass at A-level.
• Quotes Asher Tropp – that teaching has been “an important avenue of social mobility for the working class child”.
• Continues to be the case. Floud and Scott’s research shows that almost half of teachers in 1970s were descended from working class grandfathers. More working class teachers in non-grammar schools.
• Kelsall, Poole and Kuhn (1972) found that more working class graduates thought of careers in teaching than middle-class.
• Suggestion from research by Jackson and Marsden that working class teachers were conservative in their approaches. Quotes Jackson and Marsden: “‘With their own education they were pleased, and most wished to see no changes in the present system, unless it be that grammar schools should be more selective still, and penalties to be imposed to prevent lower working-class children from entering them in any numbers.”
• Spens Committee supported the view that grammar schools did not requite professional training to teach in them (time better spent mastering subjects).
• Cambridge School criticised conventional examinations. They objected to the measurement of memorising literary facts, knowledge of form and the analysis of literature in the classicists mechanical fashion.
• Quotes L.C. Knight (1933): “Any English master interested in education who has prepared a school certificate form knows that bitter feeling of waste …. Since the damage done to education by external, “standardising” examina­ tions is so gross, obvious, persuasive and inescapable, the time has come to press firmly for their abolition.”
• Many teachers supported examinations in English due to “sense of obligation to their pupils”. The social background of teachers did not give them the confidence of Cambridge English scholars (who were not dependent on qualifications). Many felt “culturally” insecure in teaching creative English where it might threaten their working class pupils’ futures.
• Mathieson: “It is significant that, although progressive approaches to English teaching have gradually been receiving greater official accept­ ance since the end of the First World War, they have, until very recently, been most widely implemented in schools for young or less- able children. Given the social backgrounds of many school teachers and the expansion of examinations during the past forty years, it seems unlikely that the expressed high aims of English teaching could have gained widespread acceptance in secondary education.”
• During 1960s numbers of well-qualified graduates entering teaching fell noticeably. Even though there were few barriers for entry into the profession.
• Suggestion that interdisciplinary teaching turns teachers off (away from their subject).
• Mathieson: “At every level of the teaching profession the relatively poor academic qualifications of recruits indicate its depressed image in comparison with other careers. Teaching remains unattractive to well-qualified graduates and to those from high-status social back­ grounds.”
• Mathieson identifies the lower academic attainment of non-graduate teacher-trainees.
• Mathieson: “In contrast with France, where the aristocratic ideal was replaced by the intellectual, the status of the teaching profession in this country is low. In England, it seems likely that the persistence of the character­ building model in teacher-training has been largely responsible for a disparaged professional image.”
• Mathieson: “It has been widely suggested that the colleges’ long-sustained hos­ tility to the basic disciplines of education, their emphasis upon the practical rather than the academic, their desire to invest teaching with social purpose, have all contributed to the depressed status of the teaching profession.”
• William Taylor – Society and the Education of Teachers (1969) – argues that there has been a tendency to prize other qualities in teaching (eg. warmth) than academic excellence. He argues for “the need for a theory of teaching that no longer makes arbitrary and socially inspired distinctions between intellect and character, that recognises the moral force that inheres in the organisation of academic disciplines, properly taught.”
• Colleges and universities appear to be more interests in changing pupils’ values than in instructing them. Courses are generally “child-centred” and generally unacademic.
• Professor Jackson – Life in Classrooms (1968) – comments on lack of teachers’ use of technical terms, conceptual simplicity. Jackson observes that teachers have uncomplicated views of causality, are “opinionated” rather than open-minded when confronted with alternatives. Jackson says teachers resemble clergymen, therapists, physicians etc.
• In 1970s there were still insufficient numbers of English teachers (25% non-specialists).
• Mathieson: “It seems very likely that, while the expressed aims remain diffuse and vaguely defined, English will be taught in many schools, certainly at the lower age levels, by anyone whose heart is in the right place. It might be more helpful to the subject’s status, in spite of supporters’ anxieties about examinations, mechanical methods and the need for emotional content, if, instead of being viewed as largely inspirational and, therefore, any willing teacher’s undertaking, its goals could be more precisely defined. The heavy price of neglect is being paid in many schools for diffuse and lofty aims which, it is so often insisted, can only be achieved by exceptional people. This view of English in schools seems to arise from the co-existence of a low-status profession with the problems of disseminating liberal culture throughout a largely indifferent society. While it persists, however, focussing almost exclusively upon the inspirational, it is unlikely to strengthen pro­fessional confidence or to achieve serious consideration for English in the classroom.”