The human species is unique in the world of nature in that nurture plays such a dominant role in its development. It is the ability to acquire and accumulate knowledge that enables a civilized culture to grow out of humanity’s genetic seed-bed.

But if learning is an intrinsic feature of human culture, the pedagogic role, as we have come to understand it today, is not. The circumstances that led to the creation of the modern concept of the ‘professional’ teacher are clear enough. As the means of knowledge storage and transmission became increasingly symbolic, and as human labour in general...

Canada conforms to the basic public educational norms that obtain in most modern societies, that is, the state provides a dozen or so years of free, universal, and (to the age of sixteen) compulsory schooling. Based on these norms, the demand side of the teacher labour-market is primarily demographically driven. In essence, the compulsory school-aged population at any moment will, given a set student/teacher ratio, determine the number of teachers required.

Beyond the compulsory grades, the demand for teachers becomes somewhat more elastic, as demographic and institutional factors are less rigidly predetermined. Obviously, the size of the relevant-age population sets...

That individuals differ widely in their personal characteristics is hardly questionable. Similarly, social aggregations, from whole nations to nuclear families, may also exhibit quite unique characteristics as a kind of collective property. It is, of course, important to avoid stereotyping individual members of such groups since divergence from the norm is often considerable. However, it is fundamental to occupational analysis to examine to what extent the characteristics of a particular work-force cluster around specific modalities that are over- or under-representative of the larger society.

The properties associated with a given occupation may reflect not only the actual work requirements, but...

The overwhelming majority of schoolteachers are public employees of local or regional boards of education which function under the legislative aegis of provincial ministries (or departments) of education. While it is the local board that is the direct employer, the provincial ministry is the certifying authority. The usual employment practice for properly certified teachers is a set probationary period followed by the granting of tenure if the probationary teacher’s contract is renewed. Tenured teachers cannot be terminated without formal demonstration of cause, or lack of demand for service. Historically, the interpretation of the terms of employment were assumed under the...

The door was opened for the establishment of teacher associations when Egerton Ryerson’s plans for public school reform were embodied in the Ontario Common School Act of 1846 – an act which eventually became the model for all other jurisdictions (Johnson 1968). Although it was recognized that the transformation of the dilettante teaching-force of the pre-Ryerson era into a specially trained and licensed body would inevitably be slow, ‘the governing ideology’ of the first teacher associations was, as Brimer (1985) notes, ‘that of professionalism’ (5).

However, frustration came early and remained until late. Successive shifts in the demand for teachers,...

In most liberal democratic societies, public education comes under the direct jurisdiction of the state. Canada is no exception. However, jurisdiction is one thing, control another. First, the concept of the state is a holistic abstraction that encompasses a number of more fragmentary realities. In a federal system, the powers of the state are divided between local, regional, and national governments. Second, the state has both political and administrative branches. The political aspect of state power is based on an electoral constituency mandate, whereas the administrative function is extensively mediated by layers of delegated authority. In theory, policy is established...

Public schooling, as we understand it today, had its origins in the industrial revolution. The notion that everyone has both a right and an obligation to obtain a basic education has two rather contradictory bases. On the one hand, modern industrial society requires that all citizens hold incommoncertain basic cognitive skills and social attitudes. On the other hand, industrial society also demands anuncommondiversity of specialized knowledge and occupational functions. The contradictions inherent in this dualism are further reinforced by the paradoxes of liberal-democratic ideology which is committed at one and the same time to the amelioration...