topped oaf. But what would anyone expect? He was just a teacher." (That is Washington Irving's superstitious, simple, Ichabod Crane.)

"A ridiculous figure, his bald head covered with an ill-fitting wig...a man who had aspired to be a doctor but who had been forced by poverty to be nothing more than a schoolmaster." (That is Mark Twain's description of Old Dobbins.)

"Their teacher was a gaunt, red-faced spinster, with fierce, glaring eyes." (That is Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel.)

These fictional teachers are part of a peculiarly American paradox – a paradox compounded of a high regard for education on one hand and the generally low regard that has usually been accorded teachers on the other. Time and the kind of people entering the profession have enormously elevated the status of teachers, of course, but historically they have drawn mixed reviews, as witness Willard S. Elsbree on the Colonial schoolmaster:

"He was a God-fearing clergyman, he was an unmitigated rogue; he was amply paid, he was accorded a bare pittance; he made teaching a life career, he used it merely as a steppingstone; he was a classical scholar, he was all but illiterate; he was licensed by bishop or Colonial governor, he was certified only by his own pretentions; he was a cultured gentleman, he was a crude-mannered yokel; he ranked with the cream of society, he was regarded as menial. In short, he was neither a type nor a personality, but a statistical distribution represented by a skewed curve."

Somewhere on that curve appeared Joannes Van Ecklen, who signed a contract in 1682 to "keep school' in the town of Flatbush, Long Island. Five hours a day, six days a week, from September to June, Joannes taught a class of about 16 children (some schoolmasters handled more than 100). He received the tuition fees plus a salary - with the use of a dwelling, barn, pasture, and meadow thrown in.

With no lesson plans to draw up, few papers to grade, no curriculum materials

to select, no conferences to attend, Joannes would have run out of things to do, even after making quills, the most timeconsuming adjunct to teaching. So it was understood he would take a second job – as minister's assistant, though had he lived elsewhere he might have been juryman, town crier, registrar of probate, or tradesman. (John Thelwell of Wilmington, Delaware, held so many extra jobs that someone recalled: "It would be easier to say what he did not do than to recount his numerous duties.")

s minister's assistant, Joannes was to

A "keep the church clean....serve as

messenger for the consistory...give the funeral invitations, dig the graves, and toll the bell. ." He was of course paid extra for this moonlighting.

Considerably further up the social scale were the schoolmasters of New England's Latin grammar schools. Usually coming from wealthy or at least well-connected families, these pedagogues were charged with preparing the sons of other well-to-do parents for college, though many regarded this task as a barely bearable stop-gap until they could arrange more lucrative and prestigious careers.

Lowest on the teaching ladder in Colo

ICHABOD CRANE

nial times was the "dame" - a housewife, often the spouse of the local minister, seeking extra income. She listened to the younger children recite their letters and the older ones read and spell from their primers while she sewed or knitted. It was the dame who polished manners, instructed the youngsters in how to bow and curtsy properly, and impressed on them the importance of avoiding such vulgarities as "stepping on vermin in the sight of others." The first dame to set up shop in Northfield, Massachusetts, reported that she cared for 20 youngsters during the summer months and found time to "make shirts for the Indians at eight pence each."

Procedures for hiring teachers were fairly uniform throughout New England. A selectman or town father recruited candidates who then stood for approval by the minister and before a town meeting. Outlying areas settled for anyone answering an ad or located by hearsay. As for Joannes Van Ecklen, the people in Flatbush were doubtless more concerned with whether he held a license from the British governor of New York which guaranteed his religious conformity than with his academic achievements.

The schoolmaster's wages were usually low, since he was in most instances deemed an unproductive worker, a tolerated neces sity, a cheap commodity. He represented the budget item that could most readily be squeezed for greater community economy Whether such treatment was the cause or the effect, townspeople found that hiringa schoolmaster could be risky. One was ac cused of paying "more attention to the tavern than to the school"; another was fired for "obtaining articles from stores in the name of the rector and taking them to pawnshops." Contracts were usually written for a year and if the schoolmaster failed - whether for reasons of drinking, using profanity, piling up debts, behaving "unseemly" toward women, or simply for being unpopular with the community he'd move on or make a change in his pro fession.

two or three a year. Normal schools offered one-year (and later, longer) courses that taxed neither the pocketbook nor the mind. Men were admitted, but it was young ladies who flocked to them.

The first normal school students came straight from elementary school; if they retained a smattering of what they had learned there they were acceptable. After a few years the standards were raised to require two years of high school. Not until after 1900 was high school graduation a prerequisite. Highbrow education was not the goal of these young ladies. Some may have had a desire to serve mankind through teaching, but many were seeking a profitable way to spend the time between school years and marriage.

With the institution of grade levels in the schools and the consequent separation of the younger from the older children, the argument no longer held that females made unsuitable teachers because they could not handle obstreperous older boys. It had to be conceded that they could at least cope with the younger children, the Boston Board of Education declaring, for example, that women were "infinitely more fit than males to be the guides and exemplars of young children"; that they possessed milder manners, purer morals, which makes "the society of children delightful, and turns duty into pleasure."

ot everyone jumped on the distaff

N bandwagon Rhode Island

superintendent insisted that no matter how well qualified, a female teacher could not be employed "for the same reason she cannot so well manage a vicious horse or other animal, as a man may do."

But the voices of dissension soon became muted, and before long, women were appearing in classrooms everywhere. In 1862, New Jersey reported: "It is somewhat remarkable that the number of female teachers has been gradually increasing from year to year, until it now exceeds the number of male teachers...." Other States were soon to report similar experiences. The Civil War would ring the final knell to teaching as a predominantly male profession.

The average woman teacher, because of her youth, because she was not career minded, because she was ignorant of national affairs, did not involve herself with the State and local teachers' associations that were forming. She was seen as having no interest in educational reform and in any case insufficient knowledge and experience to contribute to it. Those who tried found themselves subjected to sometimes humiliating discriminatory practices. Women were, to be sure, welcomed by the new National Teachers Association, founded in 1857, which later became the National Education Association (NEA).

But in those days if a female wanted to present a paper, regulations required that it be read for her by a male member. Meanwhile as education leaders debated whether teaching could be reduced to a science and if physical culture and singing belonged in the "regular branches," the great body of teachers was more concerned with the practical problems involved in "boarding out" or the personal penalties their careers exacted of them.

The male teacher had long "boarded around" on the theory that close association with local families would give him a better understanding of the students and the community. Not that this was the teacher's idea. Living as a guest afforded little privacy, no guarantee of nourishing food or warm quarters, limited control over leisure time, and the frequent discomfort of long trudges to and from school. It was simply a cheap way to support the schools. A Pennsylvania county superintendent argued : "By this mode the burden of boarding the teacher is never felt; whereas if the teacher were boarded in one place, and money paid therefore, the cash cost of supporting our schools would be nearly double."

Historian Mason Stone tells of a Vermont schoolmaster who suffered a diet of tough gander. The bird was served at a Monday dinner and thereafter for each

meal, including breakfast, for the rest of the week. The schoolmaster confided in his diary: "Dinner - cold gander again; didn't keep school this afternoon; weighed and found I had lost six pounds the last week; grew alarmed; had a talk with Mr. B. and concluded I had boarded out his share."

B

ecause women were more trouble to board than men and fewer homes offered them hospitality, boarding around was gradually "phased out" during the second half of the 1800s. Nevertheless, the teacher continued to have little personal freedom and to be the object of close scrutiny - except, curiously enough, in the area of professional skills. Few laymen, or educators for that matter, were competent to judge teaching ability and fewer still bothered to try. The situation changed somewhat with the advent of county superintendents, but even then teachers could expect an inspection visit only about once a year. Moreover, county superintendents were elected to their positions, and some were merely inept political hacks who looked at outside paint with more diligence than they reviewed performance in the classroom. Many others, however, conscientiously did their best to cover their territories with horse and buggy and do whatever they could to make schooling more effective. The situation sometimes

with their teaching. Before and immediately after the war, the management of their private lives extended even to being told to what charities they were obliged to contribute. Tenure was insecure, without provision for sickness or old age. And to take a stand on a public issue was to commit professional suicide. Personal freedoms were similarly limited. Well into the 20th century, the common habit of tobacco chewing was adequate cause for denial of certificates to male teachers. A teacher who was for some reason invited to a party was not supposed to dance, and failure to attend church services regularly was taken as sure proof of moral decay. As late as the 1930s, one teacher complained : "I cannot be funny or act like a human being. I must possess all the dignity and peculiarities of an old maid."

Employment of teachers in their home towns was prohibited in Alabama, and a North Carolina county outlawed "quarreling among teachers." Between 1920 and 1930, school authorities in several communities refused to appoint teachers who bobbed their hair, painted their lips, or rouged their cheeks. Such restrictions often were embodied in State codes or written into contracts. A Virginia county school system rule still on the books in 1935 read, "Any conduct such as staying out late at night, etc., which may cause criticism of the teacher will not be tolerated by the school board."

As individuals, teachers were often praised, venerated, and even loved by the communities they served. As a class, they were stereotyped – congenital old maids of both sexes, too incompetent to compete in the world of work, too frustrated to take their place in normal society, somewhat odd in appearance and dress, lacking in social graces. "You can tell a teacher as far as you can see one," went one of the clichés. Or, "He who can, does; he who can't, teaches."

As with Americans generally, the arrival of the 20th century was accompanied by considerable gear-shifting with regard to teachers - in their status, in the way in which they were viewed, and in the way they viewed themselves. Both cause and effect were involved in a surge of activity chiefly conducted through local and State professional organizations at first, then

rising to the national level – aimed at achieving better salaries, tenure, higher certification standards, a larger role in setting school policies, and greater personal freedom. In the beginning these moves brought few gains, but as a consequence of them the pattern was set. Teachers were determined to win a place in the sun.

Their efforts have not been universally welcomed or endorsed, particularly when their new-born militancy was translated into boycotts and strikes. Even then, however, the criticism has primarily been directed toward the organizations involved rather than teachers as such. Moreover, to the extent that their demands have been aimed at providing more competent instruction and more effective learning, teachers struck a responsive chord. Meanwhile teachers were becoming not simply more militant but better educated, more competent, more involved. And as it turned out, more highly respected.

C

onsider, for example, some results from a series of Gallup polls conducted for Phi Delta Kappa, the education fraternity. When asked if they would like their children to become teachers, three out of four parents said yes, they would, and when the sample was narrowed down to parents with children still in school, the ratio climbed to four out of five.

As for the teachers themselves, though they have changed considerably over the years, there is this constant: Like the Colonial schoolmaster, he or she is an individual, "neither a type nor a personality, but a statistical distribution represented by a skewed curve." Only today the curve is even less symmetrical. It includes blacks in cities and suburbs, people with Spanish surnames, Native Americans on and off reservations. As it

includes people trained in traditional institutions who earned their credentials by taking traditional courses, so does it encompass people who have been certificated because they acquired and demonstrated specific competencies. It includes people who completed college in four years and went straight into teaching, and it includes people who have climbed a career ladder through multiple levels. It includes people who teach in a conventional manner in self-contained classrooms as well as individuals who work in "open" or "free" schools where youngsters are responsible for much of their own learning.

rom a compilation of statistics about teachers by the National Education Association comes this odd assortment of facts: The median age of teachers is 35 years. A little over eight percent of all teachers are black. About 50 percent of all teachers come from blue-collar working class or farm backgrounds, but the percentage of teachers with fathers in one of the professions is increasing. There are more male teachers today than there were five or ten years ago, especially on the elementary school level. Seven teachers in ten are married. The percentage of men teachers with working wives has increased. Ninety-seven percent of all teachers hold at least a Bachelor's degree. The best prepared teachers tend to work in large school systems.

Finally, a statistic that serves as a kind of intangible monument to the teaching professionals who recognize the unending series of challenges they are called upon to meet and who have the will and the courage to meet them: Nine of every ten teachers plan to go on teaching. -MYRTLE BONN

Office of Education Program Specialist