Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Twenty-Four: Are Teachers Part of the Working Class?

When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge.

As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”).

As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.

The attached article for the ESJ Ning is prefaced by the following:

Hello everyone,

Attaches is another article that I sent to the ESJ Ning. It is prefaced by the following:

Glen Filson, author of the article, “Ontario Teachers’ Deprofessionalization and Proletarianization,” contends that teachers are facing conditions that are increasingly similar to the working conditions of the working class. His article is undoubtedly dated (published in 1988), and some of his conclusions need to be qualified (such as defining the class position of teachers as semi-credentialed rather than credentialed in the Manitoba context, where teachers do generally require to attend university for five years), but his argument does provide food for thought.

He defines professionals in terms of three kinds of control: control over the means of production (for example, owners of machines, raw material, buildings and so forth that enable them to live without working); control over organizational assets (for example, control over certain key organizational skills, such as computer system designers or engineers) and credentialed professionals (such as lawyers and doctors). These kinds of control may overlap at times, of course.

The author discusses how professionals may become part of the proletariat (the working class). Those who are professionals—or who desire to be treated as professionals—are often dependent on the state (or, if you like, the government) since it is the state that can legitimize their claim to professional status, thereby separating them from the working class (who are not treated as professionals). The reverse side of the coin is that, since professionals are dependent on the state for their continued status as professionals, the state can have their status as professionals questioned. This move by the state may, ironically, lead to even greater efforts to claim professional status in order to prevent treatment as a mere employee or member of the working class.

The function of teachers, at least from the governmental point of view, is to execute the mandates of the government. Teachers, from that point of view, are state employees and not professionals in their own right.

The working class, generally, lack control over what they produce and how they produce it. Teachers have had their roles increasingly restricted, Filson implies, so that the reality of professionalism has given way to the ideology of professionalism. Teachers may control how they teach (pedagogy)—and even then, that is being eroded through such bureaucratic forms as performance appraisals (subject to limited grounds for grievance and, even if grieved, resulting in repetition of the performance appraisal, to the probable great stress of the so-called professional  teacher)—but what they teach is increasingly specified by the school bureaucracy and central government departments. In addition to lacking control over what they teach, teachers’ workloads have increased substantially—an intensification of their labour. Both characteristics—loss of worker control and intensification of labour—are characteristic of the working class.

The trend has been, furthermore, for more teachers to become generalists rather than specialists so that they are more substitutable, further eroding their claim of professionalism (this is less true at the secondary level).  Standardization and  the push for making schools more responsive to market conditions have also led to increased rigidification in the division of labour as teacher functions and tasks become routinized, leading to even further substitutability among teachers.

The deskilling process has resulted in increasing alienation of teachers from their work, but oppression at work assumes an individualized response through “psychologizing” the problem. The problem is defined in terms of “teacher burnout,” and the solution is, typically, to seek individual counseling, psychologists or psychiatrists rather than collectively addressing the problem. (It is merely necessary to look at the Disability Benefits Plan of MTS to see the accuracy of such a judgment. It is a purely medical model, and it hardly addresses the causes. The problems are defined purely in individual terms and, consequently, so too are the solutions.)

Filson draws an interesting contrast between Ontario teachers reactions to their deskilling and the industrialization of the school system, on the one hand, and Quebec teachers on the other. Ontario teachers still cling to their professionalism, keeping aloof from the working class (like Manitoba teachers) whereas Quebec teachers seek solidarity with other members of the working class.

Although Filson’s characterization of teachers as semicredentialed because not all teachers have at least a B.A. does not apply to Manitoba teachers, his description of the deskilling process of teachers’ work certainly should give food for thought.

Almost as an afterthought, Filson includes statistics on the distribution of gendered teachers and the distribution of gendered principals. Not surprisingly, given the gendered nature of our society, women form the majority of teachers but only a minority of administrative positions. However, the purpose of these statistics are unclear. Typically, many liberal feminists seek to “equalize” the distribution of women within administration rather than calling into question the anti-democratic (dictatorial) appointment of principals from a hierarchically-based administrative system—a bureaucracy. Rather than criticizing the bureaucracy, such liberal feminists seek to hierarchical equality.

Filson provides an analysis of the deskilling of teachers at colleges, and his conclusion is that they face just as much if not more alienating work conditions than public and private school teachers.

On the other hand, despite the attacks on academic tenure, tenured professors generally lead a professional life; they live a relatively autonomous life with only the beginnings of proletarianization. They do research according to definitions of their own requirements, but their teaching is more supervised than before. Filson does, however, imply that there is a trend in academic life: the trend to reducing funding in areas critical of the status quo and an increase in funding in areas that are useful for the capitalist economy. The neoliberal attack has thus made inroads in the level of control of professors over their work, but it has not been able to undermine such work to the extent that it has in schools and colleges.

How does this situation relate to equity and social justice issues? In the first place, addressing such issues requires power, and if the power of teachers lies less and less in their professional status, then they need to look to other avenues to compensate for such a loss of power—and indeed to increase their power.

If indeed it is the case that teachers’ working conditions are approaching those of other employees, then the issue of the forging of alliances between all employees arises. The forging of alliances between, for example, MTS and the Manitoba Federation of Labour, for instance, would be seen as less problematic.

Should  equity and social justice chairs not address the need for power to achieve equity and social justice? Should we not question whether MTS’ aloofness from the labour movement is counterproductive, especially given the tendency towards proletarianization of teachers’ work?

How can teachers fight to prevent further erosion of their control over their working conditions if they do not forge alliances with other organizations that fight against employers?

What should be done if teachers’ work is being proletarianized?

Equity and social justice often requires that we look beyond our own immediate conditions to the conditions experienced by others. On the other hand, equity and social justice also requires that we sometimes gaze inwards and assess how equitable and just are our conditions of life. Although it may be difficult for teachers to complain about their level of income (when compared to many other groups of employees, in any case), the issue of the level of control over their own working conditions needs to be addressed. Such working conditions do not just mean class size—although it is a part of such conditions. The level of autonomy over pedagogical techniques, the curriculum and assessment policies and procedures also determine the level of professionalism—and whether we can engage effectively in equity and social justice issues. Without time, for instance, to do so, most teachers simply aid in reproducing the status quo—and an inequitable and unjust world.