Education systems and Teachers' Unionism in World

Teaching and teachers unionism

Introduction
Measured in terms of its members, teaching is the world's largest profession. In the late 20th century it was estimated that there were 30,000,000 teachers throughout the world. Though their roles and functions vary from country to country, the variations among teachers are generally greater within a country than they are between countries. Because the nature of the activities that constitute teaching depends more on the age of the persons being taught than on any other one thing, it is useful to recognize three subgroups of teachers: primary-school, or elementary-school, teachers; secondary-school teachers; and university teachers. Elementary-school teachers are, by far, the most numerous worldwide, making up nearly half of all teachers in some developed countries and three-fourths or more in developing countries. Teachers at the university level are the smallest group.
The entire teaching corps, wherever its members may be located, shares most of the criteria of a profession, namely (1) a process of formal training, (2) a body of specialized knowledge, (3) a procedure for certifying, or validating, membership in the profession, and (4) a set of standards of performance—intellectual, practical, and ethical—that is defined and enforced by members of the profession. Teaching young children and even adolescents could hardly have been called a profession anywhere in the world before the 20th century. It was, instead, an art or a craft in which the relatively young and untrained women and men who held most of the teaching positions “kept school” or “heard lessons” because they had been better-than-average pupils themselves. They had learned the art solely by observing and imitating their own teachers. Only university professors and possibly a few teachers of elite secondary schools would have merited being called members of a profession in the sense that medical doctors, lawyers, or priests were professionals; in some countries even today primary-school teachers may accurately be described as semiprofessionals. The dividing line is unprecise. It is useful, therefore, to consider the following questions: (1) What is the status of the profession? (2) What kinds of work are done? (3) How is the profession organized?

The status of teachers
Teaching enjoys average to high status, depending in part on the amount of study required to prepare for employment. Since this ranges from a relatively brief time to many years, the levels of social and economic status span a wide range.

The economic status
Salaries
The salaries of elementary- and secondary-school teachers have generally been relatively low, particularly before 1955, at which time they increased sharply in some countries. In industrialized nations at the beginning of the 20th century, teachers in this group were paid hardly more than semiskilled labourers. In Europe during these years they were relatively better off than they were in theUnited states, partly because many primary-school teachers in Europe were men, with families to support. In general, primary-school teachers who are womenand have relatively little academic training for their jobs tend to receive low salaries. In Brazil in 1957, for instance, the average annual salary of a teacher—usually a woman—in the official state primary-school system was the equivalent of about $850. It was even less, only $231, in the locally financed municipal schools. Teachers may, and generally must, take other jobs or look after their families and homes concurrently. The poorest countries, in any case, still provide relatively low primary-teachers' salaries. In India, for example, poorly trained teachers in village schools are paid only one-tenth as much as teachers in select city schools; and, even in commercially prosperous Japan, primary-school teachers are paid only about as much as a bank clerk, an office worker, or a salesperson working in a department store.
When salaries are too low to provide what teachers regard as necessities, they add other jobs. Men are more likely to do this than women. In 1965–66, male municipal schoolteachers in the United States derived 84 percent of their total income from their salaries as teachers; 7 percent from summer employment; and 6 percent from “moonlighting,” or working at a second job, during the school year. Working at a second job is much more frequent in countries in which the school day is less than seven hours or the teaching load (for secondary-school teachers) less than about 25 classes a week. In Brazil and other Latin-American countries, for example, where the average teaching load of a secondary-school teacher is about 12 classes a week, many teachers take two full-time teaching jobs, and some are forced to go beyond that to earn a living.
The salaries of university teachers and others who teach in postsecondary institutions have traditionally been substantially higher than those of secondary-school teachers. This reflects the fact that university professors generally have spent more years in preparation for their work and are more highly selected. But in recent years university salaries have not increased as much as those of other teachers. Though North American university salaries are among the highest of their kind in the world, they fall below the average incomes of medical doctors, dentists, lawyers, and engineers. Salaries in higher education in Russia are higher, in relation to other comparable occupations, than U.S. salaries. A teacher in a Russian pedagogical institute (which trains schoolteachers), for example, is paid slightly more than an engineer who has completed a university course.

Fringe benefits and other advantages
Vacations and leaves of absence give a prized flexibility to teaching careers. One of the attractive things about teaching, for instance, is the long annual vacation, usually in summer, which can be used for recreation, for further study or training, or for earning more money.
Leaves of absence are also more frequent than in other occupations. The sabbatical leave is a widespread practice among universities and is even available in some school systems. Formerly a fully paid leave for study or research every seventh year, it is now often reduced to a fully paid leave for a half year or half-salary for a full year. Maternity leave is generally available to women teachers, and in the United States many teachers are provided with paid maternity leave. Sick leave and short-term leave for personal needs are also often provided—with continuing salary for teachers validly absent for a few days.
Other benefits are becoming quite common; some of them, such as pensions, have been in practice in Europe for many decades. Life and health insurance, another fringe benefit, is usually paid partly or wholly by the school system or the university.
Seniority rights, enjoyed by teachers in many school systems, give them preferential treatment in transfers to other schools and in class assignments within their system.

Social and occupational status
According to a number of sociological surveys, university professors generally rank high in public estimation, comparable to medical doctors, lawyers, owners of large business and industrial establishments, bankers, and officials of national government. On a scale ranging from 1 (high) to 7 (low), a university professor is ranked 1 in most countries and 2 in others. A secondary-school teacher is generally ranked 2 or 3 on the same scale, sharing the level with journalists, clergy, business managers, accountants, insurance agents, real-estate or land agents, and substantial landowners. A primary-school teacher is generally ranked 3 or 4 on the 7-point scale, on the same level occupied by social workers, office managers, bank clerks, small independent farmers, and foremen.
In Japan the evolution of the teaching profession has been somewhat similar to that in Germany. Both countries traditionally have had more men than women teaching in elementary schools, and as late as 1964 only 22 percent of Japan's secondary-school teachers were women. Women were not encouraged to become teachers in Japan until after 1874, when the first Women's Normal School was founded. Both countries had several clearly marked status positions within each school level, depending on the amount of training and on seniority. The moral stature of Japanese teachers was regarded as an extremely important part of their qualification.
Distinctions between primary- and secondary-school teaching die hard. In Europe and South America , for example, adolescent students training in normal schools to become primary-school teachers are generally addressed, referred to, and treated as children, while their counterparts in university preparatory schools are addressed as adults. Prospective primary-school teachers are normally called pupils and not students and are often addressed in the familiar forms of speech (tu or Du instead of vous, usted, or Sie) in contrast to university students.
Whatever the status distinctions may be, the teaching profession in general is an important avenue of upward social mobility. Because teaching does not require capital, property, or family connection, it provides a good opportunity for the economic and social advancement of able and ambitious young people. A study of Chicago public-school teachers in 1964 indicated that approximately half of them had come from families of skilled, semiskilled, or unskilled workers (Robert J. Havighurst, The Public Schools of Chicago: A Survey Report, ch. 16, 1964). A study of the social origins of middle-school teachers in Brazil in 1963 showed that approximately half of them had moved up in social class as a result of becoming teachers (Robert J. Havighurst and Aparecida J. Gouveia, Brazilian Secondary Education and Socio-Economic Development, ch. 9, 1969).
Within the profession, the degree of status mobility is not great, at least in the primary and secondary schools. A classroom teacher is likely to remain a classroom teacher unless he or she seeks out an administrative post or follows some specialty, such as curriculum work, counselling, or the teaching of handicapped pupils. In university teaching, on the other hand, there is a hierarchy of three or four steps within any institution and of prestige and salary among institutions. Thus a university teaching career in the United States normally leads from the rank of instructor or assistant professor to associate professor and to full professor; in Britain the titles are assistant lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer or reader, and professor; similar rankings occur in other countries.


The teaching profession in Russia
As in all other modern countries, the length of preparation for elementary-school and secondary-school teaching in Russia has expanded since the early decades of the 20th century. Most new teachers have had four years of work in a university or pedagogical institute after completing the basic 10-year school of general education. Competition is intense for places in the universities and pedagogical institutes. About 70 percent of teachers in elementary and secondary schools are women.
Teachers are paid for a 24-hour week of actual teaching time in elementary schools, and 18 hours in secondary schools. They are paid extra for overtime work, which includes correcting papers in some subjects, holding conferences, and visiting parents. Many teachers earn up to twice the basic salary by extra hours of teaching. In rural areas, housing is furnished, including heating and lighting. After the age of 55, teachers may retire on a pension of 40 percent of the last salary received. They may draw the pension and continue to earn a regular salary if they want to continue teaching.
University faculty members have a high status, comparable to that of other professional groups. Their salaries place them among the highest-paid workers; they also receive payment for lectures, articles, and books.

Functions and roles of teachers
Broadly speaking, the function of teachers is to help students learn by imparting knowledge to them and by setting up a situation in which students can and will learn effectively. But teachers fill a complex set of roles, which vary from one society to another and from one educational level to another. Some of these roles are performed in the school, some in the community.
Roles in the school or university
Mediator of learning
Disciplinarian or controller of student behaviour
Parent substitute
Confidant to students
Judge of achievement
Organizer of curriculum
Bureaucrat
Scholar and research specialist
Member of teachers' organization
Roles in the community
Public servant
Surrogate of middle-class morality
Expert in some area of knowledge or skills
Community leader
Agent of social change
In those areas in which teaching has not yet become a profession, the teacher may fill fewer of these roles. The primary-school teacher in a simple agricultural society, for example, will fill only the first five of the school roles and the first and possibly the second of the community roles.
Some of the roles conflict; that is, the performance of one, that of disciplinarian, for example, tends to conflict with another, such as that of confidant to students, or the role of independent and creative scholar will tend to conflict with that of the bureaucrat. In the community the role of surrogate of middle-class morality tends to conflict with the role of agent of social change. In the presence of these role conflicts, the teacher must learn to balance, to know when and how vigorously to act in a particular role, and when to shift to another in a flexible way.

Role in Curricular design
The family, the government, the church or religious authority, and the economic or business-industrial authority all have an interest in the development of children and youth, and all play a part, therefore, in setting up and controlling formal and many informal means of education. In the more-developed societies, they employ teachers to do the work of education, and they work out with the teacher an understanding of what the teacher is expected to do. The more “professional” the teacher is, the more autonomy he demands and is given to teach within the concept of understood and mutually accepted goals and methods.
The elementary-school teacher must teach the basic mental skills—reading, writing, and arithmetic. Beyond this, the elementary-school teacher must teach facts and attitudes favourable to the nation or the church or any other institution supporting the school. Thus he must teach in a way that is favourable to communism in China, to a mixed capitalist-socialist economy in Britain or the United States, to the French or Brazilian systems in France or Brazil, and so forth. In a society in which schools are directed by churches or religious groups, as in Spain, he must teach the relevant religious beliefs and attitudes.
In national and state systems of education, the legislature generally requires that certain subjects be taught so as to “improve” the citizenship or the morality or the health of the students. Many systems, for instance, require secondary schools to teach about the pitfalls of alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. A growing number of nations require teaching in favour of conservation of natural resources and protection of the physical environment against air and water pollution. Before World War II a central course required in the Japanese schools was “moral education.” After the war this was abolished by the American occupation forces on the grounds that it tended to inculcate a kind of authoritarianism and nationalistic ideology. With the ending of the military occupation, however, the Japanese government reintroduced a compulsory course in moral education, which became a source of major controversy between conservatives and progressives within the Japanese educational profession. The French school system also has a compulsory course in “civic morality.”
Matters of curriculum and choice of textbooks and materials of instruction are determined in some countries with little or no participation of the individual teacher. Thus, in France, with a highly centralized national educational system, the course of instruction in the elementary schools is fixed by the Ministry of Education. In the United States, where each of the 50 states is its own authority, there is much more curricular variation. Some states require statewide adoption of textbooks, whereas others leave such matters to local decision. Many large-city school systems have a curriculum department to set policy in such matters, and the individual teacher in a city school system or in certain state systems thus has relatively little power to decide what to teach. There is more flexibility at the secondary-school level than in the primary-school level. As for methods of teaching within the classroom, the individual teacher probably has more autonomy in the United States than in most European school systems.
The university teacher almost anywhere in the world has substantial autonomy in the choice of textbooks, of content to be covered in a particular course, and of methods of teaching. In general the only limits on the university teacher are set by the nature of the teaching assignment. If he is one of a number of teachers who teach a popular course, such as general chemistry or physics or history, which is taken by several hundred students and offered by several different instructors, he may have to use the same textbooks as those used by other instructors, and he may have to prepare his students for common examinations. On the other hand, in those courses that he alone gives, he has wide freedom to choose the content and methods of instruction.
In terms of the professional responsibility of teachers for what they teach, there is a major distinction between the university and elementary-secondary school systems. At the level of higher education, teachers have the power and the responsibility of defining the curriculum—its contents and its methods. This is the essence of academic freedom in higher education. The governing board of the university, whether it be a government or independent university, does not tell teachers what to teach or how to teach. There are, nevertheless, some external requirements operative on the university teacher. If he is preparing his students for examinations not under university control (civil service examinations, state bar and medical examinations, examinations for a certificate as a public accountant, or the like), his autonomy is limited by the necessity that his students be well prepared for these external examinations.
In contrast to the power of the university governing board, the board of an elementary- or secondary-school system has, but generally delegates to the school administration, the power to determine what is taught. The school administration, consisting of the superintendent, school directors, inspectors, and curriculum specialists, has effective power over the curriculum and brings the classroom teacher into the process as much or as little as it chooses. With the growth of teachers' unions and organizations, however, it appears that collective action by teachers is tending to increase the effective autonomy of the classroom teacher. Administrative and legislative prescriptions for the school curriculum are generally resisted in principle by the teaching profession; the profession presumes itself better able to decide what to teach and how to teach it.

Extramural activities of teachers
Traditionally, the schoolteacher has been a surrogate of middle-class morality who serves the local community in various clerical or secretarial capacities because he or she can write legibly and spell accurately. Furthermore, the schoolteacher has often been expected to support the local religious group, if there is one, by teaching children, singing in the choir, and so forth. In other words, the teacher is seen as a useful minor civil servant, without deviant political or economic attitudes.
Though this may be true of most teachers in most countries, there are exceptions. In places where the community is polarized along religious or political lines, for instance, teachers generally have to take sides in local politics and cannot easily serve the whole community. Thus, in the small towns of France, the stereotype of schoolteacher is traditionally that of a man with leftist political leanings, always at war with the village priest. In the cities, schoolteachers are needed less to perform local community services and tend as teachers to be politically neutral or invisible.
University teachers are more likely to be leaders in local politics and local civic affairs. Since the university is expected to be a source of ideas as well as of information in controversial areas, university professors may perform this function by taking sides on political and economic issues. Those in the sciences, for example, may become influential advisors on local and state problems of health, water supply, transportation, or the use and conservation of natural resources. When the university teacher does take sides on controversial economic or political issues, he may expect counterpressures to have him discharged, and his institution may or may not support him in the name of academic freedom.
As elementary- and secondary-school teachers have organized themselves for collective action, they have succeeded increasingly in protecting those of their group who do take unpopular positions on political and economic matters. In countries with two-party or multiparty political systems, teachers may now run for elective offices, and they and their organizations are likely to take sides on political issues. Thus the teacher at any educational level is increasingly free to take part in promoting social changes, and at least a few teachers are generally found in leadership roles in local and national politics.

Scholarship and the profession
Within the profession, prestige has traditionally gone to the productive scholar, the one who contributes to the growth of knowledge, literature, or art. Promotion in the university and fame in the world outside the university have gone to the person who does research or scholarly work—and publishes. The university is seen as an institution to discover new knowledge, as well as to pass on what is known, and these two functions are not necessarily tied together. The teacher of adolescents and of university undergraduates does not find that research or scholarly work makes him a better teacher. Only when he is teaching graduate students who themselves are being trained for scholarship does the university professor find himself working at the frontier of knowledge, with his students as apprentices.
The universities of the world have adapted to this situation in two ways. One is to assign some teachers a teaching role, with a heavy teaching load and recognition when they do a good job of teaching; the other is to give teachers a reduced teaching load and expect them to do research or writing. A second adaptation is to assign some staff members to full-time research with a few graduate students associated with them as apprentices and research assistants. In any case, it is the fact that the universities of the world, which claim the responsibility of advancing knowledge, do continue to judge their teachers more by their research and writing than by their teaching.
University teachers are also much in demand for consultation and advice to industry, business, government, and school systems. The best experts on problems of innovative development and on the conduct of industrial research and development are generally found in universities, and many teachers find as much as a quarter to a half of their time taken with consultation.

The career of the teacher
The professionalization of teaching
In the 19th century, systems of public education developed in order to meet the recognized need for universal literacy in an industrializing society. Teaching at this primary level was at first no more than a high-level domestic service, in which the teacher took over some of the child-rearing responsibility of the family. In some parts of the world, a year as a cadet teacher working under a more experienced teacher became the model for teacher training. Frequently, courses were added to the secondary school in the largest town of the county or province, for training classroom teachers. Even today in many countries, notably in Latin America, the training of teachers is still carried on largely in certain types of secondary schools, called “normal schools,” which take students (mainly girls) at about age 15 or 16 for a two- or three-year course of study. In Europe and North America, the earlier normal schools or teachers colleges have since moved up to the postsecondary level of higher education. In any event, by the turn of the 20th century some rudiments of a teaching profession had begun to evolve. There was the beginning of a program of formal training; the emergence of a body of specialized knowledge called pedagogy; the imposition of an inchoate system of licensing or certification; and the recognition of a few minimal standards of performance to be defined, expanded, and enforced by the corps of teachers.
The combined efforts of educational reformers and teachers' organizations were required to fashion the beginnings of a profession. Men and women saw themselves becoming committed to a career in teaching and therefore sought to make this career more personally and socially satisfying. The Chicago Teachers' Federation, founded in 1897, for example, comprised a group of female primary-school teachers who were faced by an experimental pension system that was actuarially unsound and by salaries that were very low. Margaret Haley, a dynamic 36-year-old Irish woman, was their leader, and in the 15 years after she helped found the Teachers' Federation, it brought a successful suit against the public utilities, forcing them to pay more taxes; forced the board of education to use the added tax income to increase teachers' salaries; affiliated with the Chicago Federation of Labor; sued the Chicago Tribune for revising its lease of school-owned land; and engineered the election of Chicago's woman superintendent of schools to the presidency of the National Education Association. Writing in 1915 in his publication, The Daybook, Carl Sandburg referred to her latest victory:
Margaret Haley wins again! . . . For fifteen years, this one little woman has flung her clenched fists into the faces of contractors, school land leaseholders, tax dodgers and their politicians, fixers, go-betweens and stool pigeons . . . . Over the years the Tribune, the News and the ramified gang of manipulators who hate Margaret Haley have not been able to smutch her in the eyes of the decent men and women of this town who do their own thinking.
Gradually, throughout the world, classroom teachers won “tenure” of their positions. In the early days, they were employed by the governing body of the school system on annual contracts; under such a system no teacher was assured of his job for the ensuing school year until he had received formal notice of his reappointment for the year. There then developed the practice of automatic renewal of the contract unless the teacher was notified by a certain date (usually three or four months before the beginning of the school year) that his services would not be needed. Finally, as school systems—local, state or provincial, and national—became more stabilized and organized, the rule of life tenure or tenure up to the age of retirement was adopted. Generally, under such a system, after two or three years of satisfactory service, a teacher achieves tenure and cannot be removed from his position except for specific reasons of incompetence or moral turpitude, and, even then, he has the right to a formal hearing on such charges.
This history of public-school teachers, involving a slow upgrading of teacher education combined with a struggle for professional recognition, has not been experienced by university teachers. Because higher education throughout the world has been limited to a selected few, it has correspondingly required relatively few teachers, and they seem to have emerged within the universities and to have been selected by the university authorities themselves. They frequently have constituted an inner circle or closed clique. There have, however, been a few instances of pressure by students and by civil government for improved professional standards. The South American University Reform of 1918, for instance, was started by students at the University of Córdoba in Argentina and was aimed at improving the low professional standards of teachers in Latin American universities.
The status and prestige of the university professor has been relatively high in most countries, and he has needed no politico-economic organization to fight for his professional status. Only in the late 20th century has there been a strong movement organized and led by university teachers to further upgrade or reform their profession. This movement has been particularly apparent in the United States, where the enormous extension of higher education has led to a growing teaching force and a consequent problem of maintaining professional standards. Since the 1950s the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has pressed for higher salaries, by publishing various studies of salary levels that have singled out universities paying relatively low salaries. At the same time the AAUP has continued an aggressive campaign for academic freedom of the professor, by defining a code of professional ethics for the teacher and a procedure through which an institution must go if it proposes to discharge a professor.

Educational associations and teachers' unions
Professional groups all over the world have organized for collective action to do two quite different things. One objective of a professional organization is to improve the economic status and the working conditions of its members. A second broad objective is to improve the service that the profession performs for society. These two objectives may best be viewed separately, and it is not clear, a priori, to what extent they are mutually conflicting or mutually supportive.
Commencing in the latter half of the 19th century, elementary- and secondary-school teachers banded together to form societies of teachers in the various types of schools and in the various school subjects. Thus Germany and France with their stratified school systems had as many as five teachers' organizations that operated more or less independently of each other. By the middle of the 20th century, however, such organizations in European countries tended to coalesce into strong national organizations. Education International, AISTF & ABRSM(INDIA) and Himachal Shikshak Kranti Manch etc. are working as revolutionary teachers’ unions having unique identity in the world.

Professional associations
University teachers have generally organized themselves into associations for the improvement of scholarship and higher education. As a rule they have operated on the assumption that society will support them financially and morally if they do a good job of scholarly research, writing, and teaching. They accept as members scholars who are not actually teaching in higher institutions but are engaged in industrial, artistic, literary, or other work.
Every country has its national learned societies, which hold annual meetings, publish journals, and generally work for the improvement of scholarship. There are national organizations of classicists, foreign-language teachers, biologists, physical scientists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, literature students, historians, and so forth. In addition there are interdisciplinary organizations, such as the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (Britain) and the Social Science Research Council (United States). Selective prestige associations also exist to further the cause of the professions and to honour individual leaders. Some prominent examples are the Académie Française, the Royal Society (Britain), the National Academy of Sciences (United States), the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Nippon Gakushiin (Japan).
International associations make the university teaching profession a worldwide force. There are international associations of scholars in chemistry, psychology, sociology, human development, gerontology, and other branches of scholarship. Special attempts were made during the late 20th century to bridge the gap separating the former communist bloc of nations from the European–North American bloc. International meetings were held in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Russia, and scholars from the erstwhile communist countries were encouraged to attend conferences in non-communist countries.

Teachers' unions and teachers' associations
In most countries there is one major teachers' organization to which all or nearly all teachers belong and pay dues. Sometimes membership is obligatory, sometimes voluntary. Thus there is the National Union of Teachers in England, the Japanese Teachers Union, the relatively young Fédération Générale d'Enseignement in France, and the Australian Teachers Union. In the formerSoviet Union, where much of the political and social life of the people had been organized around unions, there were three teachers' unions—for preschool teachers, primary- and secondary-school teachers, and teachers in higher education. These unions provided pensions, vacation pay, and sick-leave pay and thus touched the welfare of teachers at many points.
The organizational complex is stable in some countries and changing in others. England, for example, has two different associations for male and female secondary-school teachers, two different associations for male and female headmasters of secondary schools, and a separate Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions. These associations are parallel to the National Union of Teachers, which is open to any qualified teacher from nursery school to university level. The National Union has no political affiliation but is politically powerful in its own right. France, in contrast, has a wide variety of teachers' organizations, with various political leanings, but they do not get on well together and are politically less effective.
In the United States there is a basic rivalry between the National Education Association, which includes teachers of various levels as well as administrators, and the American Federation of Teachers, a trade union that excludes administrators. Since about 1960 theNEA, a loose federation of local, state, and national organizations, has become more militant in working for the economic improvement of teachers and has tolerated strikes. This policy has resulted in a reorganization of the NEA into a looser federation, with classroom teachers operating quite separately from the associations of administrators. It has also brought the NEA into direct competition with the AFT, which is relatively strong in several large cities.
Although the classroom teachers' organizations began as agents for obtaining better salaries and working conditions, wherever they have succeeded substantially in this effort they have turned to the other activity—setting standards of performance and attempting to improve educational policy and practice. Faced with great difficulties in educating children in the slums and ghettos of the big cities, the teachers' union in the United States, for instance, has put into its collective-bargaining agreements a statement of interest in, and responsibility for, educational policy and for the development of teaching methods and the training of teachers for those difficult positions.
The various national primary- and secondary-school teachers' associations have moved toward the formation of two loose international federations. One includes the national associations from the former communist bloc of countries—the World Federation of Teachers' Unions. The other, the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession, was founded in 1952 and includes most of the national associations from the noncommunist bloc. They both compete for the allegiance of teachers' organizations in the uncommitted countries.

The teaching profession and contemporary social revolutions
In almost every country with a free public voice, militants urge professional associations to take sides in political controversies over problems that do not lie in their fields of professional competence. The argument in favour of militancy is that modern societies are engaged in a social revolution that is changing profoundly the nature of contemporary society, that this revolution will have profound effects on the teaching profession, and that teachers should assume responsibility for directing education toward constructive participation in the social revolution.
At the same time, the militants foresee a drastic change in the teaching profession. They see it as: (1) more critical of itself—new members are skeptical of many of the established propositions of pedagogy and of science; (2) impatient for rapid change—the rate of social change of the past few decades is presumed to have been too slow; (3) adopting human welfare—the well-being of all people and especially of the disadvantaged—as the crowning objective of the profession; (4) looking to the student for guidance in the work of the profession—they believe in sharing power with students in the shaping of education; and (5) becoming less concerned with formal professional standards, such as diplomas, licenses, and university degrees, as well as turning more teaching responsibility over to teacher aides, using more pupils as tutors, or admitting students to universities with little or no examination of their formal knowledge.