• The status of teachers
  • The economic status
• Functions and roles of teachers
• The career of the teacher
  • Educational associations and teachers’ unions

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Teaching, the profession of those who give instruction, especially in an elementary school or a secondary school or in a university.

Measured in terms of its members, teaching is the world’s largest profession. In the 21st century it was estimated that there were about 80 million teachers throughout the world. Though their roles and functions vary from country to country, the variations among teachers are generally greater within a country than they are between countries. Because the nature of the activities that constitute teaching depends more on the age of the persons being taught than on any other one thing, it is useful to recognize three subgroups of teachers: primary-school, or elementary-school, teachers; secondary-school teachers; and university teachers. Elementary-school teachers are by far the most numerous worldwide, making up nearly half of all teachers in some developed countries and three-fourths or more in developing countries. Teachers at the university level are the smallest group.

The entire teaching corps, wherever its members may be located, shares most of the criteria of a profession, namely (1) a process of formal training, (2) a body of specialized knowledge, (3) a procedure for certifying, or validating, membership in the profession, and (4) a set of standards of performance—intellectual, practical, and ethical—that is defined and enforced by members of the profession. Teaching young children and even adolescents could hardly have been called a profession anywhere in the world before the 20th century. It was instead an art or a craft in which the relatively young and untrained women and men who held most of the teaching positions “kept school” or “heard lessons” because they had been better-than-average pupils themselves. They had learned the art solely by observing and imitating their own teachers. Only university professors and possibly a few teachers of elite secondary schools would have merited being called members of a profession in the sense that medical doctors, lawyers, or priests were professionals; in some countries even today primary-school teachers may accurately be described as semiprofessionals. The dividing line is imprecise. It is useful, therefore, to consider the following questions: (1) What is the status of the profession? (2) What kinds of work are done? (3) How is the profession organized?

The status of teachers

Teaching enjoys average to high status, depending in part on the amount of study required to prepare for employment. Since this ranges from a relatively brief time to many years, the levels of social and economic status span a wide range.

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The economic status

Salaries

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The salaries of elementary- and secondary-school teachers have generally been relatively low, particularly before 1955, at which time they increased sharply in some countries. When salaries are too low to provide what teachers regard as necessities, they add other jobs. Men are more likely to do this than women. In 1965–66, male municipal schoolteachers in the United States derived 84 percent of their total income from their salaries as teachers; 7 percent from summer employment; and 6 percent from “moonlighting,” or working at a second job, during the school year. Working at a second job is much more frequent in countries in which the school day is less than seven hours or the teaching load (for secondary-school teachers) less than about 25 classes a week. In Brazil and other Latin American countries, for example, where the average teaching load of a secondary-school teacher is about 12 classes a week, many teachers take two full-time teaching jobs, and some are forced to go beyond that to earn a living.

The salaries of university teachers and others who teach in postsecondary institutions have traditionally been substantially higher than those of secondary-school teachers. This reflects the fact that university professors generally have spent more years in preparation for their work and are more highly selected. But in the 21st century, university salaries have not increased as much as those of other teachers. Though North American university salaries are among the highest of their kind in the world, they fall below the average incomes of medical doctors, dentists, lawyers, and engineers. Salaries in higher education in Russia are higher, in relation to other comparable occupations, than in the United States. A teacher in a Russian pedagogical institute (which trains schoolteachers), for example, is paid slightly more than an engineer who has completed a university course.

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