IS TEACHING A PROFESSION?

For the last 50 years, educators have devoted a great deal of energy to the debate over whether teaching can be considered a profession. Unfortunately, this turns out to have been the wrong question, and so led us to the wrong sort of answers. For example, there was a very heated debate in the 1960s and 1970s over whether teachers could organize strikes and still claim that they were members of a professional association, rather than a union. This controversy only makes sense, however, if one accepts that professions are fundamentally different from other types of occupations, and by the mid-1970s, social scientists were beginning to realize that this was not the case. They argued that the professions had changed so much over the past 100 years that there is now little left to distinguish professionals from other workers.
If the experts are right and there really is no such thing as a profession any more, then continuing to argue over whether education is a profession is not only wasted effort, it is dangerously misleading. As M. S. Larson pointed out in her seminal study, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis,
The conditions of professional work have changed so that the predominant pattern is no longer that of the free practitioner in a market of services, but that of the salaried specialist in a large organization. In this age of corporate capitalism, the model of profession nevertheless retains its vigor; it is still something to be defended or something to be obtained by occupations in a different historical context, in radically different work settings, and in radically altered forms of practice. The persistence of profession as a category of social practice suggests that the model constituted by the first movements of professionalism has become an ideology -- not only an image which consciously inspires collective or individual efforts, but a mystification which unconsciously obscures real social structures and relations.¹In other words, by pretending that a model from 100 years ago still applies today, we are blinding ourselves to how things really are.
In this paper, then, I will draw on recent insights from sociology to argue that teachers have been using--and, in many cases, continue to use--an outdated and untenable model of the professions, and that these misconceptions have led to our pursuing the wrong goals. By redefining the issue as one of maintaining and extending teacher autonomy, rather than the spurious question of whether teaching is a profession, I hope to refocus our attention on the real issues facing teaching today.
When most people talk about the professions, they are unknowingly using the ideas of two early sociological theories: trait models and structural-functionalism. Since the public continues to use these ideas long after sociologists have abandoned them, it is important that we take a moment to examine what these two theories say, and why they are wrong.
The Trait Model of Professionalism
The sociological investigation of the professions began in the 1930s with attempts to identify the defining characteristics or traits that distinguished the professions from other occupations. While the precise content of these models varied from one writer to the next (since, to get published, each investigator tried to say something new), the most commonly cited traits were:
(1) skill based on abstract knowledge
(2) provision for training and education, usually associated with a university
(3) certification based on competency testing
(4) formal organization
(5) adherence to a code of conduct
(6) altruistic service.²
A substantial body of research quickly developed in which investigators undertook case studies of various occupations to determine the degree to which each exhibited these traits and, consequently, whether they could be considered as 'true' professions.
Popular as trait models were, however, they had no theoretical basis. Most authors simply took the established professions of medicine and law as their starting point and assumed that the unique characteristics of these two occupations accounted for their professional status. But this is an example of circular reasoning: What makes medicine a profession? These six traits. What makes these six traits the defining characteristics of a profession? They are found in medicine, and medicine is a profession. But how do you know medicine is a profession? Well, it has these six traits! And around and around you go! Actually, there is no reason to assume that medicine and law are typical professions. They may be the exceptions rather than the rule; that is, they may be considered professions in spite of having these six characteristics, rather than because of them.³
Even if one ignores the tautology, there is nothing in the model which explains why these traits are important. Why focus on these particular traits rather than some others? Indeed, many authors seem to have decided which traits were important on the basis of whether they would strengthen their case for (or against) a particular occupation's claim to professional status: Educators stressed those elements that worked best for teaching, lawyers only those that worked for law. There was little attempt to establish the causal relationships between various elements of the model, so it was never clear which traits gave rise to the others, or whether all the elements arose independently from some unexplained outside force.⁴
Furthermore, the traits themselves were never clearly defined, because one was never told precisely how much training was required, how esoteric the theoretical knowledge needed, how restrictive the certification obtained, and so on, before an occupation could be considered a true profession. Even if one were to take the average length of training in medicine or law (which itself can vary considerably between jurisdictions and among specializations) as the standard, is this an absolute or a relative standard?⁵ Does the increasing length of training in an occupation like teaching indicate its growing equality with medicine and law, or merely credential inflation? (For that matter, can the number of years of formal training be equated with the quality of training?) Given the model's inability to precisely define relevant traits, their interaction, or their origins, trait models have been completely discredited.
FOR MORE .http://www.uleth.ca/edu/runte/professional/teaprof.htm.