Sacrifice: The Unfortunate Persistence of Monastic Tradition in Public Education

During my first year as principal, 1986-87, an unmarried teacher I’ll call Morgan came to my office and told me, “I’m pregnant. On purpose. I’m due in April. I’m not getting married.”

When this happened in the 1980s, public schools were still sorting out the collision between individual employee rights and traditional social values. Morgan gave birth to her child less than two decades after Tucson began allowing married teachers to stay in their classrooms once the pregnancy was obvious.

Before public schools existed, teachers often came from monasteries and convents, where they were bound by vows of poverty and chastity. As schools have developed into secular institutions and the profession has overflowed the bounds of the religious orders, I wonder if an expectation of personal sacrifice continues to undermine not only teachers' salaries but also their status as professionals.

 Once I became a principal, I found that it was part of my job to help maintain the illusion of the chaste and bland teacher. Even as teacher celibacy stereotypes have faded, we as a nation may not have stopped regarding the call to teaching as an implicit commitment to living in worthy poverty, some willingness to occupy a subordinate and humble role.

Ironically, today’s teachers must do far more parenting in their classrooms than previous generations of educators—yet another aspect of the work inside the sacrifice paradigm but outside the job description. Imagine an accountant or a book editor or an architect, both high-intensity professionals, having to work with all their clients together in one room, six hours at a stretch, five days a week. 

Does the tradition of teacher as sacrificial instrument infect public policy and educational decision-making in America? In all the discussion of teacher compensation, does the abstemious monk or the virtuous nun hover in the background, the images against which today’s teachers are judged? I’m not sure we are beyond that yet.