Editors note: The following is summary of information and expressions of concern voiced by education and/or management researchers, compiled for the Encyclopedia of Educational Research - Sixth Edition, sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and published by Macmillan Publishing Company, in 1992. The text, according to its editor, Marvin C. Alkin of the University of California in Los Angeles, "was designed as a major work of scholarship to enlighten and guide readers on matters relating to educational research for the next decade."
The principle body of work was written by Michael J. Sedlak, of Michigan State University, in his article written for the encyclopedia and entitled History of Teachers and Teaching, on pages 1369-1373. Several supporting references have also been provided. Read and weep at this pathetic tale, for teaching is NOT what you might have thought it was.
"During the Colonial era, and through the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of teachers in America were young, white men. There were, of course, some female teachers: women in cities who taught small children the alphabet, for example, or farm girls who managed groups of young students during a community's brief summer session. But when districts recruited schoolmasters to take charge of their winter session scholars—boys and girls of all ages—they commonly hired men for the work. Convinced that good deportment was synonymous with good learning, community leaders believed that women lacked the stature—physical and social—to win or impose the authority and discipline essential to an efficient school.
"Rare were schoolmasters who taught beyond their late 20s... Surviving evidence suggests that the few females who taught typically did so as adolescents, and male teachers largely abandoned their "careers" in education by age 25.
"...They viewed school keeping as temporary work. The defection rate among teachers undoubtedly exceeded 95% within 5 years after entry. Women taught briefly as adolescents before establishing their own households and families as young adults. Young men taught while preparing for other careers--as ministers or lawyers, perhaps--or during agriculture's slow season. Teaching was transient work in America. The rewards were too low, the work brief and seasonal, and other economic opportunities were too great to keep healthy young men committed to careers in education.
"...There is reason to believe that many of the masters who built long-term careers in teaching were largely captives of the occupation. That is, in contrast with other fields open to them, teaching was a haven that offered them some degree of social mobility. A powerful colonial tradition bestowed public service jobs, such as teaching, grave digging and bell ringing, on social dependents who had few employment opportunities. (Rury, 1989; Sedlak, 1989; Sedlak and Schlossman, 1986).
"After the mid-nineteenth century the social composition of the teaching force changed fundamentally, but in a way that actually reinforced problems inherent in the Colonial pattern. By the late 1840's, across all regions in the United States, women were beginning to enter teaching in unprecedented numbers... Religious and social theory about child rearing underwent a substantial change during the early nineteenth century, particularly among the moderate, affluent, and liberal Christian sects in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. During the Colonial era, male-dominated pedagogy had assumed that children were sinful and possessed an inherent inclination toward evil that had to be controlled with force and intimidation, at least until they were old enough to experience a genuine conversion. 'Christian nurture,' as the new doctrine came to be called, increasing rejected assumptions about innate sinfulness and encouraged a view of children as capable of moving gradually toward the conversion experience that signified salvation... [Then] new pedagogies surfaced to enable teachers to fashion an educational environment that could nurture and guide children instead 