The "Love of Teaching"

In discussing the concept of "convenient social virtue" John Kenneth Galbraith remarked among the groups expected to display such "virtue" teachers. In contrast with members of professions such as medicine who are permitted to stand on their expertise and social contributions as they demand more rewards, more protection, more deference from the community at large teachers--who enjoy far less of all those things, with all that implies for their grounds to ask "for better"--are seen as behaving illegitimately should they do so. Their asserting themselves collectively in any public way in fact gets them demonized by the mainstream of American opinion, with this going so far that politicians of a certain tendency publicly denounce the country's teachers, their unions, their leaders as the greatest threat in the world today to the country's well-being without being laughed off the stage. And indeed people commonly regard it as unseemly that a teacher at all display a conventional regard for their personal self-interest as a working person in need of a paycheck to live, these instead obliged to claim that they do what they do because they "love to teach."

I do not doubt that many persons have found some satisfaction in teaching. Yet whether they do so seems irrelevant to how they should be paid for their work. After all, there is the view that an individual is rewarded economically for creating value and utilities, not how they feel about the act involved in the creation of value and utilities. There is the view--admittedly less accepted--that a person working full-time should be able to live by that work, and indeed, as those most strident about natalist views should note, be able to raise a family decently. Meanwhile if anyone cares about a job, especially a demanding one, being done well, they would be obliged to have some concern for the ability of the individual to do so--to which their material standard of living is not irrelevant--as well as the conditions, terms, material support they get when they do the job.

So no, that a teacher may "love teaching" is not an excuse to refuse them just compensation--and indeed that we are discussing such stupidities at all is a reflection of the unreasonableness of some of the public toward this profession, all as one overlooks the reality that "teaching" is not all that teachers do for what paycheck they get. As a practical matter much of their work consists of managing a group of people who are not necessarily willing or cooperative so they can teach--or merely presume to do so, the conditions under which they work perhaps making serious teaching impossible as they find themselves glorified babysitters, with these circumstances to be found even at a college level. They are also clerks in a bureaucracy, compelled to devote lots of time to record-keeping and form-filling as they participate in the system's processing large numbers of people for its ends, slotting them into various strata of the labor pool. A person may genuinely love teaching--and despise all of that. Meanwhile no one but an idiot would trust to the "love of teaching" to satisfy the immense need of teaching faculty in a country which on average gives its people fourteen years of formal schooling or more, especially given the frequent demand for specific skills that may be much better-compensated elsewhere. (One ought not exaggerate how well the STEM graduate does, but those who are proficient in math at least have the opportunity to pursue many a career that in all the material ways is much more attractive than anything they are likely to enjoy as a teacher.) Indeed, when we consider the practical side of the hiring of teaching faculty we should remember that, just as with every other position out there, teaching for a paycheck, in a private or public school system with all its requirements and restrictions, is a job that, even if some "love teaching" will on the whole be done by people not because they love the activity but because they need a job, and take this one up to the extent that given the far from perfect options they find in front of them this seems least worst, with many experiencing teaching as something to fall back on (as so many artists do--this, indeed, probably what keeps us in English teachers, certainly at the college level), and perhaps a step down from their prior occupation with respect to pay and prestige (as with, say, a software engineer who has been laid off and in a field desirous of fresh graduates, and these days maybe preferring the non-human altogether, forced to look for their next job elsewhere). In the circumstances many find that they do not love teaching at all, but do the job for the sake of that paycheck--and I would say, have just as much right as every other worker doing a job to their paycheck, the more in as "love" is not necessarily a prerequisite for the competence and the effort that really is all anyone has a right to ask of them rather than cynically, smarmily, dodging the issue by speaking of the "love of teaching" in that way of which we have seen so much in our time.