Hofstadter Chp. 12, continued

Hofstadter had a lot to say about the history of American education and attitudes towards teachers. Teaching has never been a high-status profession in this country. He claims that it is (or was, in 1963) a high-status profession in other countries, and I've heard some anecdotal reports that it's a high-status profession in countries that do better than us on international tests (e.g. Finland, the country where I want to be). A few fascinating points from the reading:

1) On page 313, he notes that some towns got teachers via a mechanism remarkably similar to Teach For America:

Others accepted the fact that a permanent schoolmaster was all but an impossibility and employed briefly a serious of ambitious young men who were on the way to other careers, perhaps in the ministry or law.

2) On page 316, he notes that in the 19th century America did a very unusual thing, and adopted a European educational practice.  That practice? Sorting students by grade.  Previously (and continuing into the late 19th century in some places) children were almost entirely educated in one-room schoolhouses with ages and grades mixed.  But with the sorting of students came specialization, larger facilities, and hence respectability.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, while Hofstadter claims that sorting students led to respectability, he also claims that it opened the profession to women, because of increased demand for teachers.  Given that high-status professions have historically been slow to open to women, I'm a bit skeptical of this claim.

He doesn't do much to reinforce it, because he goes on to note that skeptics of women teachers were silenced by the realization that they could get away with paying women less.  On the one hand, it is unsurprising that people would be OK with paying women less, and that they would put aside other concerns if they could get something for cheaper.  Still, that doesn't buttress his claim that teaching became a respectable profession.

That said, I love this sentence about low-paid women teachers:

Here was one answer to the great American quest to educate everybody but do it cheaply.

3) A few pages later, Hofstadter quotes a New Jersey school administrator lamenting in 1855 that you can't attract men of ability and promise to the teaching profession when teaching is a low-paid and still disreputable profession. This seems to undercut the claim of a few pages ago.

4) Finally, on page 320 he discusses the feminization of elementary school teaching. He claims that (1) American elementary schools have many fewer male teachers than peer countries around the world (a claim for which I don't have 1963 data at hand) and (2) this is another cause of American anti-intellectualism, because it sent the message that the life of the mind is not masculine.

Regarding the percentage of teachers who are female, in this era the number seems to be highly variable around the globe. But regarding the alleged message that studying isn't masculine, I'll just note that the percentage of male teachers increases going from elementary school to middle school to high school to undergraduate institutions to graduate schools. If anything, this sends a message that the highest tiers of knowledge are very masculine, and the lower tiers of knowledge are feminine. I don't think it fits Hofstadter's claim.