“He loved Teaching and he loved his Students.” The Teaching Profession in the Context of Social Desirability

Abstract

There are many reasons to become a teacher, and there are many reasons to carry on this profession for years (cf. Bieri 2006). The love for children, the trust in the power of education, the belonging to some sort of a ‘corps’ that has a special task, or a calling of some sorts, job security, family tradition, and many other reasons come to mind. Although every individual has his or her own reasons for becoming and being a teacher, those reasons are not purely individual as they are bound to historical and cultural notions of love, trust, belonging, calling, security, tradition, and the like. People in the teaching profession are therefore also confronted with strong social desirability and taboos regarding their job (cf. Hoffmann-Ocon 2020). Although love for their students might be a strong motive for teachers, not every kind of love for children is socially (and legally) acceptable for a teacher at any given time. Social desirability and taboos are often vague, empirically difficult to grasp, and subject to change. Yet, since people are social beings, it might be reasonable to assume that social desirability and taboos have an influence on individual career choices. Therefore, if one wants to know more about people’s motivation to pursue a career in teaching, one should not only focus on their individual reasoning alone. This is where this paper sets in. The underlying hypothesis of this paper is that people’s statements about the reasons to become or to be a teacher do not only describe their individual motivation and feelings but, because those statements are uttered publicly, they also mirror what is socially desired (or acceptable) regarding the teaching profession in a certain context and at a certain time. Based on two types of sources (biographical sketches enclosed in applications for teacher training, and obituaries of passed-away teachers), this paper aims at reconstructing the social desirability attached to the teaching profession in the decade from 1970 to 1980 in Switzerland. The leading research questions of this paper read as follows: Are there patterns of reasoning detectable in the texts under scrutiny which can be attributed to social desirability? What role does the expression of emotions play in this reasoning? If there are such patterns, more questions will follow: Are the patterns of reasoning and/or the expression of emotions the same in the two source corpora? If not, how do they differ? How do the patterns and/or the expression of emotions correspond to the political and social context of the historical period under study? Do the patterns and/or the expression of emotions remain stable throughout the whole decade or are they subject to change?