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The Social Origins of High School Teachers in a Canadian City*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Frank E. Jones
Frank E. Jones*
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Abstract

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Type
Notes and Memoranda
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , November 1963 , pp. 529 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1963

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Footnotes

*

I wish to acknowledge my debt to the Department of Demography and Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, for facilities provided for me as a Visiting Fellow which aided the preparation of this paper. I am also indebted to two of my students at McMaster University, William Newell and Lawrence Stanbridge, for assistance in collecting and tabulating the data.

References

1 Rogoff, Natalie, Occupational Mobility (Glencoe, Ill., 1953), chap. IV.Google Scholar

2 Glass, D. V., ed., Social Mobility in Great Britain (London, 1954), Table 12A, p. 201.Google Scholar

3 Adams, Stuart, “Origins of American Occupational Elites,” American Journal of Sociology, 62 (1957), 360–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Adams' study is especially useful for the information it contributes about four professional occupations. While there has been considerable research on the social origins of persons in élite business occupations–(cf. Lipset, S. M. and Bendix, R., Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley, 1959)Google Scholar; Taussig, F. W. and Joslyn, C. S., American Business Leaders (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; and Warner, W. L. and Abegglen, J., Occupational Mobility (Minneapolis, 1955)Google Scholar–there has been far less interest in the social origins of persons in professional occupations.

For Canada, although John Porter's papers on élite occupations (“The Economic Elite and the Social Structure of Canada” and “Higher Public Servants and the Bureaucratic Elite in Canada,” this Journal, XXIII, no. 3, 376–394, and XXIV, no. 4, 483-501Google Scholar) and Rocher and dejocas' study of occupational mobility (“Inter-Generation Occupational Mobility in the Province of Quebec,” this Journal, XXIII, no. 1, 57–68 Google Scholar) provide data on the social origins of various occupations, the studies were limited to a single time period and consequently cannot provide statements about trends.

4 Information obtained for eighteen teachers employed in the Roman Catholic high school is not included in this analysis.

5 North, C. C. and Hatt, P. K., “Jobs and Occupations: A Popular Evaluation,’ Opinion News, 1947, 3–13.Google Scholar These ratings were obtained from the ranking of ninety occupations by a national sample of the United States population.

6 The occupational data were also assigned values computed by Blishen, B. R., “The Construction and Use of an Occupational Class Scale,” this Journal, XXIV, no. 4, 519–31.Google Scholar As might be expected, given the high correlation between the Blishen and North-Hatt scales, analysis on this basis reveals that teachers' fathers are very much over-represented in Classes 1 and 2 of Blishen's scale, and that the average social origin of these high school teachers is above the mean value for this scale. However, Class 5 is slightly over-represented and so more teachers were below average on this scale than when the North-Hatt ratings were used. While such discrepancies between two techniques for assessing occupational ranks may be a consequence of déficiences in the techniques themselves, they may also arise from the different bases of the scales, i.e., Blishen's scale is a measure of differences in educational requirements and in income between occupations while the North-Hatt scale is a measure of differences in prestige.

7 There are only very slight differences in the social origins of teachers between Hamilton high schools, although there are statistically significant differences between the means of schools A and D and between the variances of schools A and B. There seems to be no clear tendency for teachers of a given social origin to cluster at a particular school.

8 Unless it can be shown that teachers of lower social origin retire or die earlier than those of higher social origin, it is not reasonable to conclude that retirement and death account for the higher mean and lower standard deviation of the social origin values of older teachers. Nor are there grounds for assuming that teachers of lower social origin abandon teaching for other jobs more often than teachers of higher social origin.

9 “Origins of American Occupational Elites.” A similar trend was evident among teachers in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales where the proportions of teachers whose fathers were professionals or held higher administrative positions decreased over time, defined in terms of entry into teaching in time periods ranging from before 1919 to after 1945. When emergency-trained teachers are excluded, the greatest gains in this period were virtually monopolized by persons of lower middle-class origins. Emergency-training gave the advantage to persons of lower-class origins. However, an estimate of the percentage of persons entering teaching among those leaving school at the age of seventeen revealed a decrease in working class representation in the teaching profession in England and Wales. See Jean Floud and W. Scott, “Recruitment to Teaching in England and Wales,” in Halsey, A. H., Floud, Jean, and Anderson, C. Arnold, eds., Education, Economy and Society (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

10 The mean North-Hatt rating for Hamilton teachers is well within the regional United States ratings while the standard deviation is somewhat higher than in the United States. Neither the mean nor variance of the Hamilton sample is significantly different from any regional US mean or variance.

11 Adams, , “Origins of American Occupational Elites,” Table 1, p. 363 Google Scholar; Figure 1, p. 364. The author of a study of teachers in four German secondary schools concludes that teaching “is a favoured stage in upward mobility or a second-choice occupation for university-educated individuals.” See Kob, J., “Definition of the Teacher's Role,” in Halsey, , Floud, , and Anderson, , eds., Education, Economy and Society, 568–9.Google Scholar

12 Specific occupational inheritance is not evident in this sample if this requires teaching to be the most frequently reported occupation of teachers' fathers. Although twenty teachers’ fathers were teachers, this occupation was outranked by farmer, manager, and proprietor.

13 This is suggested by the inverse relation between school drop-outs and socio-economic status; see Your Child Leaves School, Report no. 2 (Toronto: Canadian Research Committee on Practical Education, 1950).Google Scholar See also Hall, Oswald, “The Stages of a Medical Career,” American Journal of Sociology, XLIII, no. 5 (1948), 327–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a statement of the social factors influencing the formation of aspirations towards a career in medicine.

14 See Miller, D. C. and Form, W., Industrial Sociology (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, chap, XVIII and XVIII, for a discussion of Trial and Stable work periods.

15 These census years span the median year of birth for each social origin. Even if the 1931 census is the basis of comparison, since some of these teachers were born between 1931 and 1935, an over-representation of urban-born high and low-origin teachers is still evident while urban-born middle origin teachers are only slightly under-represented.

16 See Stephenson, Richard M., “Mobility Orientation and Stratification of 1,000 Ninth Graders,” American Sociological Review, XXII, no. 2 (1957), 210.Google Scholar In this study, among the three occupations most frequently cited by female respondents, teaching is clearly the leading choice among those of high status, whether expressed as an occupational aspiration or a realistic expectation of future employment.