The politico-cultural significance of teachers’ ‘professionalization’ movements: a compared analysis of American and French cases

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the ideational factors underpinning the movements to professionalize teachers in the United-States and in France. It demonstrates that the deep driving force behind these movements is neither the modernization of schooling, nor the professional interests of teacher educators, but the politico-cultural hold of a philosophical paradigm that met the values and ideals of education and political systems’ actors. By associating human progress with social progress based on natural laws, the naturalistic standpoint of this philosophical paradigm won the favor of the times. Nevertheless, the adaptive conception of intellectual and moral development it supports entails a separation of the mental world of education specialists from that of academic scholars. As a consequence, the major missions of formal education shifted from the training of the mind through the understanding of subject-matters to that of whole social personalities through situated or experiential forms of understanding, the paradoxical outcome being a loss of teachers’ autonomy in terms of professional expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• teacher professionalization
• education politics
• educational change
• school expansion
• progressivism

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Nathalie Bulle is a sociologist, research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, Paris), with the Groupe d’Etude des Méthodes de l’Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne (GEMASS) in France. Her research has focused on educational policies, pedagogical development in the West, the measurement of inequality of opportunity and epistemology in the social sciences. https://nathaliebulle.com/.

ORCID

Nathalie Bulle http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9134-0681

Notes

1 Interpretive sociology (verstehende Soziologie) is attached to the version of methodological individualism theorized by Max Weber, who defines sociological explanation on the basis of an ‘interpretive’ understanding, or else, a rational understanding of the subjective meaning of social action. As the neo-Weberian conflict approaches are also attached to methodological individualism, but tend to focus on the instrumental dimension of rationality (social groups’ interests), it is preferable here to preserve the sociological term ‘interpretive’ to differentiate the present approach, based on a broad conception of rationality, which brings into play interpretive systems, and also the axiological dimension of social action.

2 Parsons (1939) rejects the categories of altruism and egotism in the explanation of individual motivations. It is the social role systems intrinsic to the differentiation of professions that are supposed to account for the constraint exerted by the social system on motivations, through expectations of others and individual needs for gratification (Parsons, 1951).

3 Labaree’s analysis followed the publication of two reports in 1986 (A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Tomorrow’s Teachers, issued by The Holmes Group, a consortium of deans of colleges of education from about one hundred leading research universities) advocating the ‘professionalization’ of teachers in order to overcome problems in American education, as identified in a number of reports during the 1980s, including A Nation at Risk (Gardner, 1983).

4 Even if some critics of progressive education had appeared in the 1930s and 1940s (see Bagley, 1939), developments of the ‘life adjustment movement’, with the publication in 1948 of the Life Adjustment for Every Youth official report, appeared to be a final drift of progressivism. The movement was broadly inspired by the ‘connectionist’ psychology of Edward Thorndike’s psychology, which promoted habit formation through task specific training. This drift became a major target for the historian.

5 What Bestor describes as ‘an interlocking directorate’ includes three professional groups: the first group is formed by the professors of education in universities, colleges and normal schools; the second group is formed by the superintendents, principals and other local public school administrators and supervisors; the third group is formed by ‘experts’ and other bureaucrats in the state departments of public instruction and the federal Office of Education (the ‘education officials’).

6 Criticisms of Bestor’s book were relayed by specialized journals, which tended to point to the lack of scientificity of Bestor’s argumentation and to focus on technical details, rather than its basic claims, or its charge against the anti-intellectualist drift in American education, which they supported. They reproached him for not clearly considering the educational needs of the new school populations, which were described as having no academic interest or abilities (see Hand & Sanford, 1953). For elements on the context of the controversy begun by Bestor, see Béreau, 2013; Cochran-Smith et al., 2008; Houston, 1990; Wayne, 2013; Kliebard, 1986/2004.

7 See for instance Cunningham, 1959; Hand, 1953; Hand & Sanford, 1953; Susky, 1959.

8 ‘an ideological shift from the Socratic concept that knowledge is virtue to the Baconian postulate that knowledge is power; another would be an ideological shift from the other-worldliness of medieval Christianity to the this-worldliness of modern democratic secularism; another would be an ideological shift from the fixed and completed world of Aristotle and Newton to the process world of Darwin and Whitehead’ (Cunningham 1959, p. 166).

9 The basic assumption of the modernization thesis is that

a fundamental trend towards expanding universalism characterizes industrial society. Objective criteria of evaluation that are universally accepted increasingly pervade all spheres of life and displace particularistic standards of diverse groups, intuitive judgments, and humanistic values not susceptible to empirical verification. The growing emphasis on rationality and efficiency inherent in this spread of universalism finds expression in rapid technological progress and increasing division of labor and differentiation generally, as standards of efficiency are applied to the performance of tasks and the allocation of manpower for them. (Blau & Duncan, 1967, p. 429)

10 See also Bullough (2001) for comments on these two movements.

11 Between 1890 and 1918, compulsory attendance developed from twenty-seven states to all states, and from a mean age of fourteen years and five months in those states which had such laws in 1900 to a mean age of sixteen years and three months in 1920 (Hofstadter, 1962, p. 326). In France, the 28 March 1882 law on primary education introduced compulsory schooling for all children between the ages of six and thirteen, except for students obtaining the primary school certificate at the age of eleven. Compulsory schooling was then extended to the age of fourteen by the 9 August 1936 law. Finally, the order of 6 January 1959 took the end of compulsory schooling to the age of 16 for children who were six years old on or after 1 January 1959.

12 The first teacher associations were the Western Literary Institute, the College of Professional Teachers and the American Institute of Instruction. The most important of them is the National Teachers Association which appeared in 1857 and became the National Educational Association in 1870. In the second half of the eighteenth century, organizations of institutions also appeared such as, for instance, various regional associations of colleges and secondary schools. The American Normal School Association appeared in 1858 and became the Normal School Department of the National Educational Association in 1870 (Cremin, 1953a).

13 The report swings between the two meanings, identified here as formal and politico-cultural, of professionalization.

14 In 1915, Rollo Walter Brown (1915, chap. 7), a Harvard professor of literature, estimated that the training of young French secondary school graduates (baccalaureate level) was comparable to that of young Americans who had spent two years in higher education. Moreover, based on a survey he conducted, he assessed that US teachers of the first years of secondary school had on average only spent a few days in higher education whereas French teachers teaching at an equivalent level had spent more than three years in higher education. The average difference in academic preparation between American and French high school teachers could therefore be estimated to be the equivalent of five years of studies.

15 Prior to the creation of the IUFMs in 1989, the academic preparation of secondary school teachers was only completed by a year of internship.

16 Which grouped approaches as varied as movements for manual and professional training, for the measurement of intelligence, for student activity and child-centered education, for social efficiency, and so forth. A very extensive historiography is associated with the development of educational progressivism in the United States, of which we retain only a few key elements here.

17 In this more recent article Labaree (2005) is interested in the period studied by Bestor but, by overestimating the oppositions in play within the progressive movement, and arguing a victory of administrators over educationists, he does not sufficiently take into account the in-depth work of the philosophical paradigm in which the whole progressive movement is rooted.

18 For a critical appraisal see Bulle (2018).

19 ‘For nearly a generation there has been a steady conflict between the academic tradition and an emerging insistence upon an education which focuses in the core of current life experiences. The former educates by advancing the systematic disciplines in the grasp of the new generation, while the latter sees knowledge as functions and the organization of knowledge as unique for each learner, appropriate to the course of his own experience’ (Evenden, 1933a, p. 466).

20 The opposition is linked to the Academic–Direct life issue considered above: ‘the latter having mainly to do with the question of where the content of the educative process shall focus, while this issue concerns itself primarily with method and attitude in the teacher-pupil, mature-immature, relationship’ (Evenden, 1933a, p. 478).

21 ‘Educators have not taken seriously enough the naturalistic view of the individual which has been prevalent in educational psychology of the past quarter century. They cling to the belief in an inner nature more or less independent of the interacting natural scene in which the individual is a part, and so long as they cling to it they fail to get a clear picture of the dependence of the personality of the individual upon his social, cultural surroundings’ (Evenden, 1933a, p. 491).

22 The other oppositions taken into consideration are: Science-Philosophy; Traditional individualism-Socialization and Heredity-Environment.

23 To other analysts of the period, 1907 is the symbolic pivotal year, with the publication of the Committee of Seventeen report on the professional preparation of high school teachers, and with the 1907 conference of the National Education Association where views regarding the logical versus psychological development of subject-matters were opposed (see Bolton, 1907; Brooks, 1907; Bullough, 2001, pp. 658–660; Monroe, 1952, p. 203).

24 This separation led, Lawrence Cremin (1962, p. 176) writes ‘to an inexorable divorce from the arts and sciences that tore asunder the teacher preparing function of the university and increasingly insulated the work of the pedagogical faculty’; ‘Unfortunately’, writes Hofstadter (1962, p. 338), ‘as Cremin has observed, the schools of education and the teachers’ colleges grew up with a high degree of autonomy. Increasingly, the mental world of the professional educationist became separated from that of the academic scholar’.

25 It is to be noted that even if Monroe presents his work as driven by an eclectic philosophical orientation, he is heavily inspired by the functionalist educational ideas dominating his times: ‘It is only through engaging in […] activities that the child learns. The teacher cannot communicate skills, ideas, facts, principles, and ideals directly to the student; knowledge is not transferred from a textbook to the learner’s mind’ (Monroe, 1927, p. 2).

26 The survey led by James Koerner (1963) based on the analysis of many reports, curricula, and the conducting of interviews, attests to the ideological and institutional separation that existed between education experts and liberal arts and sciences scholars.

27 Strong movement appeared after the Second World War toward the regulation of the professional preparation of teachers through the development of instances of support and control at national level. Following the six-volume report of the National Survey of the Education of Teachers by the US Office of Education in 1933, the Major issues in Teacher Education report was published (Smith, 1938) by the American Council on Education and, as a result, the Commission on Teacher Education was created, which began to work in 1938 on The College and Teacher Education report proposed in 1944. In 1946, thirty-five state education associations organized commissions or committees on teacher education and professional standards and the National Commission on Teacher Education and Professional Standards was created, as was the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) in 1948, and the Journal of Teacher Education was first published in 1950 (Peik, 1950, p. 14), see also Monroe (1952) and Koerner (1963).

28 The memoirs of the Minister of Education, René Haby, justifying his decisions concerning the reform of the junior high school (the ‘college’ in France) into a single institution, show that the latter constituted, for him, a response to the accusation made to the school of reproducing itself, see Haby (1981).

29 See on this subject Billard (2013, chap. 1).

30 The idea of progress throughout Darwin’s work can undoubtedly shed light on the value placed on progress, and its literal promotion in ‘progressivism’.