The Teaching Life and its Hidden Psychological Costs

One of the more interesting aspects of Upton Sinclair's study of the American school system The Goslings is his treatment of the situation and outlook of the schoolteacher with respect and sympathy, but also without the hypocrisy to which our "convenient social virtue"-demanding era is addicted. Yes, teachers do important work under lousy conditions--many of them rather heroically--but they are also human beings with human weaknesses and failings, the more in as they must cope with those lousy conditions. As Sinclair remarks, "[t]he effect" of these "is to reinforce and intensify the occupational diseases of the teaching profession, which are . . . aloofness from real life," and "timidity."

As Sinclair puts it, a "teacher lives in a little world of her own," during which she spends time primarily with students who, at the K-12 level, and especially its lower levels, are "children," and primarily has contact with other adults "whose life is as narrow as her own." Moreover, the same administrators, the same society, that accords them so little pay and respect apart from the "compliments [that] cost less than nothing" that John Galbraith spoke of as the aforementioned "virtue," "shut up" the teacher's "mind in class greed and snobbery," telling the teacher that they are a "lady" or "gentleman," a salary-earning member of the white collar middle class rather than a wage-earning member of the working class that people with the barest claim to gentility so fear, and desire to set themselves apart from (and are afraid of falling into) they really are members of that working class in the ways that count as "an employe of the school board and the superintendent" rather than "a free citizen" or "professional expert" (however much that propaganda of convenient social virtue tells them they are "professionals").

Indeed, as Sinclair remarks, his experience of "school and college administrators" expect the loyal, cheerful, "willing and obliging" attitude that he remembered in "want advertisements of 'domestics' in the days of [his] boyhood"--all as, as he puts it in a chapter titled "Teachers' Terror," he discusses the frightened attitude of those instructors who see through the illusions and delusions. As Sinclair remarks, those persons in professions that society really respects as professions--"lawyers . . . doctors . . . engineers" do not "permit their superiors to exercise control over their social life, and forbid them to dance or play an occasional game of bridge," nor keep them in a state of "such subservience that they regard themselves as bold progressives when they utter harmless platitudes." Moreover, the habit of being afraid makes "rabbits" of them, a tendency that in many a case remains with them long after many of them have departed the profession altogether and so can no longer be tyrannized the way they were before.

I imagine that many think all this today--but very few would dare put it the way Sinclair did, especially when arguing on behalf of teachers.