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The Sociology of TeachingEric Bredo & Sue Ellen HenryPublished online: 17 Sep 2010.
To cite this article: Eric Bredo & Sue Ellen Henry (1996) The Sociology ofTeaching, Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational StudiesAssociation, 27:1, 1-14, DOI: 10.1207/s15326993es2701_1
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RECONSIDERATIONS
The Sociology of Teaching. Willard Waller. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1932 (reprinted in 1961).
ERIC BRED0 and SUE ELLEN HENRY University of Wrginia
Though times have changed since Willard Wqler's The Sociology of Teach- ing was first published in 1932, it is still unsurpassed in richly detailed and penetrating insights into the social lives of teachers.' Waller's sociology was concrete and detailed, based on a wealth of examples and vignettes drawn from case studies and personal observations of rural midwestern secondary (and upper elementary) schools. Waller informed this material with the best sociological theory of his time, drawn from the Chicago School of Sociology in its heyday. Combine this particularity of detail and theoretical sophistica- tion with a Menckenesque wit, and one has a lively and opinionated book that is still useful to practitioners and theorists alike. Waller may have written some time ago, but in many ways he is still ahead of us.
Waller's Background
Waller was the son of an Illinois school superintendent and a woman from a genteel physician's family, who together experienced "forty years of un- remitting marital conflict" (Goode and others 1970, p. 7). Born in 1899, Wal- ler moved within Illinois from community to community as his father changed school superintendencies. He studied to be a French teacher as an undergradu- ate at McKendree College in Illinois, and then, after a brief tour in the Navy and a stint at journalism, taught Latin and French at a military academy. He married and attended the nearby University of Chicago during its heyday in the 19207s, receiving a Master's in Sociology in 1925. By 1926 his marriage ended and he left for doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania where he wrote a dissertation on the process of alienation in marriage (Waller, 1930). He remarried and went to teach at the University of Nebraska where he wrote most of The Sociology of Teaching and was subsequently fired for not reveal- ing a confidence about a student pregnancy. From there he moved to Pennsyl- vania State University where he completed The Family (Waller, 1938). His
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2 RECONSIDERATIONS
career ended at Columbia of a heart attack at the age of 46, just as he was gaining wider recognition.
Waller's Approach to Sociology
These biographical details are pertinent to understanding Waller's sociol- ogy because, more than most sociologists, he drew on autobiographical in- sights. He wrote about what he knew-school superintendents, high school teachers, marriage and divorce, and the military-and often used his personal experiences as sources of insight. This is no doubt one reason that his sociol- ogy is rich in detail and particularity. Another is that Waller was writing in a tradition in which particular instance and theoretical generalization were not so divorced as they often are today.
Waller's approach was principally influenced by his training at the Univer- sity of Chicago. At the time Chicago was the leading school of American sociology. While the members of the Chicago sociology department were di- verse, there were some common influences on them, including Darwin, the Pragmatist legacy of Dewey and Mead and Cooley, and the work of Georg Simmel, a German interactional sociologist (Wolff, 1950). Among the hall- marks of the "Chicago" approach, particularly Dewey and Mead's version, was a concern for both particularity and universality. Time and place were important, and not to be ignored in the search for general laws. Consistent with Darwinian theory, in which adaptation was viewed as local, generaliza- tions must emerge from and be helpful within local contexts. Process was also important, as Dewey, Mead, Cooley and Simmel all focused primarily on communication or association rather than on reified entities like the society or the individual (Dewey, 1920). Chicago sociologists also benefited from Simmel's subtle and paradoxical consideration of conflict, in which conflict and cooperation, and hostility and solidarity were viewed as intertwined and co-created.
Today, it is more common to emphasize ideological division. A given soci- ologist is often considered to be a functionalist or a conflict theorist, a macro- theorist or a micro-theorist, a theorist or a practitioner. But like the Chicago tradition from which he came, Waller is difficult to place in these simplistic divisions. Functionalists and conflict theorists, for example, tend to share a view of schools as well-adapted to serving extrinsic social ends. One group thinks they serve the ends of the society as a whole, the other that they serve the ends of an elite, but both agree that they are well-adapted to such ends. Waller did not share this assumption. He saw schools as more likely to be a hodge-podge than a coherent organization, and as influenced by a variety of groups and interests rather thin a single group or class:
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 3
The list of those who have sought to use the tax-supported schools as channels for their doctrines is almost as long as the list of those who have axes to grind. Prohibitionists, professional reformers, political parties, public utilities, sectarians, moralists, advocates of the open shop, labor unions, socialists, anti-vivisectionists, jingoes, chauvinists, and patrio- teers-all have sought to control the curriculum, the composition of the teaching staff, and the method of instruction. In widely differing degrees all of these groups have succeeded. . . . To a degree, the explanation of the contradictions of the school is to be found in the conflicts that rage about it. . . . Thus the school is shot through with accommodations, some of which have grown so old that their original purpose has been forgotten.
(PP. 16-7)
Among the groups affecting schools are school teachers and administrators themselves. What goes on in schools, then, is not likely to be a coherent re- flection of a single well-defined external interest, but the result of the interac- tion of different groups and different times, including educators. This ap- proach challenges the assumption that schools are rationally adapted to external aims. It also provides a rationale for seriously looking at the inner processes of schools, rather than viewing them as so externally determined that their inner operation can simply be read off from their presumed role in serving society or elites.
Would we do better to view Waller as a micro-theorist who ignored the larger structural concerns of functionalists and conflict theorist? In a sense this is correct. He did tend to focus on single institutions, such as the school or family, and on the dynamics of face-to-face interaction within them. Yet Waller looked at teaching in terms of a series of nested contexts-community, school, classroom-so he was certainly sensitive to different levels of social organization. Furthermore, Waller was not just an interactionist in the sense of emphasizing interactional freedom in contrast to the structural constraint (Blumer, 1969; Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel, 1981). He viewed structures such as the institutional roles and dominance relations of school as extremely im- portant. Indeed, at times he seemed to see teachers' lives as virtually deter- mined by these structures. At other times he placed equally great emphasis on the precariousness of control and the contingent results of interaction. In fact, the central feature of Waller's sociology involves his complex and ambivalent approach to the relation between structural determinism and interactional con- tingency in social life. Either way, it is hard to write him off as "merely" an interactionist.
Waller saw the purpose of his sociology as fostering insight into social situ- ations rather than discovering universal laws or developing formal theories for their own sake. To aid in the development of such insight he drew from the best theories and concepts of his time, but also from rich case materials of
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4 RECONSIDERATIONS
small-town, midwestern schools, with an aim of giving insight into situations "typical of the typical school" (preface). The function of such insight was to help teachers use an understanding of social processes in personally and situationally relevant ways:
Better, then, than to suggest specific techniques as always useful, and better than to attempt to develop like character traits in all teachers, would it be to attempt to give teachers a complete understanding of the social processes centering about school life, and to leave to each one the task of working out that technique which will help him most in carrying on the particular sort of education which he considers desirable. (p. 306)
Perhaps because he does not fit into today's categories, Waller is often viewed as unsystematically eclectic. There is some truth to this, but a case can be also made that his work is an example of a sociology that is not well-understood today.2 He wrote in a tradition in which the categorical divisions separating functionalists and conflict theorists, macro- and micro-theorists, or theory and practice, would be viewed as rigid, polarizing prejudices. Failing to under- stand the character of this tradition, one will, perhaps, fail to understand Waller.
The Sociology of Teaching
In The Sociology of Teaching, which was the first comprehensive sociology of the school (Bidwell, 1989), Waller sought to understand the lives of teach- e r ~ . ~ His principal concern was why teachers' lives are so bleak. As David Cohen has suggested, Waller was a disappointed idealist who "hated school and loved education" (Cohen, 1989). The disappointed side of him described schools as threatened "despotisms" in which those with conflicting interests met and covertly warped and stunted each other's personalities.
It is not enough to point out that the school is a despotism. It is a despo- tism in a state of perilous equilibrium. It is a despotism threatened from within and exposed to regulation and interference from without. It is a despotism capable of being overturned in a moment, exposed to the in- stant loss of its stability and its prestige. It is a despotism demanded by the community of parents, but specially limited by them as to the tech- niques which it may use for the maintenance of social order. It is a despo- tism resting upon children, at once the most tractable and the most unsta- ble members of the community . . . the school is continually threatened because it is autocratic, and it has to be autocratic because it is threatened. The antagonistic forces are balanced in that ever-fickle equilibrium which is discipline. (p. 11)
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 5
Teachers lives were grim, according to Waller, because they had to maintain dominance under conditions of constant threat and vulnerability.
If Waller's realistic side described the grim working of schools and their disorting effects on personalities, his idealistic side aimed at their long-run, progressive change.
As between the narrowed and channelized personal interchange which now takes place in the schools, and the broader, freer communion advo- cated by progressive writers, our preference is for the latter sort of tuition. But we feel that both the theory and practice of education have suffered in the past from an overattention to what ought to be and its correlative tendency to disregard what is. When theory is not based upon the existing practice, a great hiatus appears between theory and practice, and the con- sequence is that the progressiveness of theory does not affect the conser- vatism of practice. . . . Be it ours, then, to try to understand institutional leadership in its present form and to hope that that understanding may lead to its reform. (pp. 192-93)
Waller approached schools by working from wider contexts down to the individual teacher. He moved from relations between school and community to relations within the school as a whole, then relations between individual teachers and their classes, and, finally, to the effects of teaching on the person- alities of teachers. At each level, his focus was on the interplay of narrow institutional relations and broader, more organic, relationships, much as Cooley (one of his early favorites) had been concerned with the interplay of secondary and primary groups (Cooley, 1962).
The School and The Community
Waller tended to see schools as having a difficult role both culturally and social-structurally. Culturally, schools seek to impose the cosmopolitan cul- ture of the cities and more developed parts of the society on the small rural towns. As he put it, "Teachers are paid agents of cultural diffusion. They are hired to carry light into dark places" (p. 40).
To do their jobs, teachers should usually be a little "beyond" the commu- nity, but this difference in knowledge and ideals tends to make them discon- tented and gives them a feeling of being "better" than the community. Not being reinforced by the community, they lose their idealism, their missionary zeal. They may also withdraw and seek support from their peers, reinforcing a sense of difference and isolation. As Waller put it, "The teacher is a martyr to cultural diffusion" who "must take what consolation he can from the fact . . . that he is a carrier of cultural values" (pp. 40-1).
If teachers seek to impose a cosmopolitan culture on the community, com-
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6 RECONSIDERATIONS
munities return the favor by seeking to impose their own cultural standards on teachers.
Among these ideals are those moral principles which the majority of adults more or less frankly disavow for themselves but want others to practice; they are ideals for the helpless, ideals for children and for teach- ers. There are other ideals which are nearly out of print, because people do not believe in them any more. Though most adults have left such ideals behind, they are not willing to discard them finally. The school must keep them alive. The school must serve as a museum of virtue (p. 34).
For instance, women teachers were not to date or marry (Waller suggested they must be thought to "reproduce by budding"), nor smoke, nor manicure their nails (too uppity). Male teachers could marry, but were also under tight moral rein. One might be called "professor" at the barbershop, but this signi- fied both respect and ridicule-"something more than a god and something less than a man" (p. 49). Thus, each side tended to defend its values by idealiz- ing its virtues while denigrating those of the other. Such cultural tensions can lead to isolation and defensiveness, to which both sides contribute.
Closely related to these cultural tensions are structural tensions associated with the school's role in the system of social stratification. While Waller im- plicitly agreed with contemporary functionalists that schools select mostly on a meritocratic basis, he thought that schools overemphasized a conventional type of intelligence:
. . . . it seems very likely that the intelligence which the schools reward most highly is not the highest type, that it is a matter of incomplete but docile assimilation and glib repetition rather than of fertile and rebellious creation. How many star students are grade-hunters and parrots rather than thinkers!. . . The intelligence most useful in the schools is that which enables the student to recite well and to pass tests. (p. 24)
Waller agreed with conflict theorists that schools commonly function as "sorting machines," reproducing social statuses from one generation to the next. However, he did not think that it was realistic to think that schools could be used to bring about a classless society. Besides, he argued, democracy does not require a classless society, only open classes. Nevertheless, he was well aware that schools are often caught between seeking to promote the growth and advancement of their students and seeking to weed them out.
It is difficult to reconcile the selective function of the school with its other social functions. . . . The (college) teacher caught in such a system is sup- posed to have a certain number of failures at the end of the semester, and this leads him to set up objective, but often highly artificial, standards; he is crucified between the necessity of having a "scatter" and that of being able to justify his standards by some reasonable criterion. It may
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 7
be doubted whether the selectivity of a school under pressure to eliminate is wholesome. It is certain that such benefits as it confers are obtained at an immense sacrifice of human values. It is certain, too, that pressure to eliminate makes teaching dry and factual, overorganized, and full of artificial barriers. (p. 27)
By situating schools in between groups with differing cultural ideals, such as nation and local community, and by considering conflicting structural inter- ests, such as fostering growth and mobility versus elimination, Waller gave a complex understanding of the teacher's role. There is no general solution to these tensions, only a set of relationships that are worked out in the course of interaction. Nor are the conflicts that result from these divergent interests even necessarily bad.
The conflict between parent and teacher is natural and inevitable, and it may be more or less useful. It may be that the child develops better if he is treated impersonally in the schools, provided the parents are there to supply the needed personal attitudes. . . . (Moreover) it would assuredly be unfortunate if teachers ever succeeded in bringing parents over com- pletely to their point of view. (p. 69)
The Social and Cultural Life of the School
Waller saw the distinctive social and cultural life of the school as created by an interplay of the institutional agendas of school authorities and the non- scholastic interests of students, with each side struggling for control of their lives. The adults of the school, teachers and administrators, sought to use school activities, symbols, and ritual ceremonies to retain student interest, foster a common identity, and otherwise maintain control. For faculty, the jus- tification of activities such as athletics, school paper, debating, glee club, etc., "is their value as a means of control over restless students" (p. 112). Students, on the other hand, used such activities as a way of advancing their own inter- ests, such as meeting needs for status and affiliation, or creating a sense of novelty and security (Waller's version of Faris' four wishes). Much of this is familiar from contemporary studies of adolescent culture and peer groups (Cusick 1973; Eckert 1989; Willis 1977), but Waller broke this ground.
Like other students of high school activities, Waller was greatly impressed by competitive athletics. Competitive athletics are useful for control because they modify the usually conflicting interests of teachers and students. Their warlike character serves a unifying purpose analogous to that of war in adult life.
By furnishing all the members of the school population with an enemy outside the group, and by giving them an opportunity to observe and par-
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8 RECONSIDERATIONS
ticipate in the struggle against that enemy, athletics may prevent a conflict group tension from arising between students and teachers. (p. 116)
Adopting such altered relations, teacher and student show different sides of themselves, possibly even appearing to be human. This interpretation ac- counts for the status hierarchy of sports, which Waller saw as running from football to basketball to baseball to track. Football has the highest status and support (at least among teachers and administrators) because it is the most warlike, and, therefore, best suited to unify the different factions of the school.
Waller also saw rituals and ceremonies, such as pep rallies before a game, or academic award ceremonies, as instruments of control. Both are used to maintain adult control while working with student interests and desires. His description of pep rallies is particularly humorous, pointing out the social significance but intellectual vacuousness of such rituals, with their appeal for total commitment to the common cause:
. . . if the adults who are charged with the duty of engineering such per- formances cannot participate because of the constant interference of their critical intelligence, then the work is better done by adults who have less intelligence or are able to keep such intelligence as they have under better control. (p. 122)
Waller also considered crowd and mob behavior and in the differentiation and alignment of teacher and student groups. The discussion of crowd and mob behavior may seem rather antiquated today, particularly since such topics are rarely, if ever, included in contemporary work; yet, fear of loss of crowd control and mob rule in contemporary schools suggests that the issue may need to be reconsidered. We will not go into Waller's analysis except to note that he has some great examples, such as that of a school in a ramshackle building in which students could literally rattle the teacher by shaking the whole building "by small and almost undetectable movements if these move- ments are properly synchronized" (p. 173).
Waller also considered the relations between teacher and student peer groups and roles in social control. In some cases student group norms and pressures to comply may be well organized for purposes of adult control, such as the "fag" system in ~ n t i s h public schools, or the "rat" system in contempo- rary American military academies, where each age cohort forms a group that helps control the one immediately beneath it. This works marvels for adult control, since the groups form a sort of stairway leading towards adult norms and values. In other cases, however, control is much more difficult and may devolve into relations between conflict groups, in which teachers must oppose students or lose status among their colleagues, and students must oppose teachers, or lose status with theirs. What is especially to be avoided is the
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 9
personalization of conflict that turns latent tensions into the equivalent of a feud between opposing clans.
-%EP .bw and pinfkss &ng&s me- ,ir &k ~ l ~ ~ ~ m n ; lir which many teachers spend their time and that of their students so wretchedly, have for the most part this explanation and no other. The teacher's use of epithets, threats, and rodomontade, varied by benignant poses, and the students' use of nicknames, mimicry, and take-off, are all part of a death struggle for the admiration of their little world. (p. 152)
Waller's whole analysis is interesting because of its delicate balance be- tween structural conflict and interactional contingency. He shows latent con- flicts and then how unique responses and counter-responses can lead relations in one direction or another. Consistent with this contingent view, Waller held out no hope for strong use of peer groups for adult purposes since the balance between institutional authority and spontaneous student life could not be so easily regulated towards a fixed end. Waller's advice for managing such rela- tions seems to come down to a clear understanding of one's institutional role (SO they do not personalize conflict) and recognition of the need to work with students, who also want a life.
Teacher-Pupil Relationships
Waller's discussion of the teacher-pupil relationship revolves around a simi- lar contrast between its institutional and non-institutional aspects. In his anal- ysis of the teacher-pupil relationship, he was concerned with how teachers are able to maintain control in their institutional roles, as well as how they may have to vary or personalize these roles in order to cope with precarious situa- tions.
Waller saw the teacher's institutional role as opposed to the "spontaneous" life of children. Teachers seek to impose school tasks, methods, and evalua- tions on students who are "much more interested in life in their own world than in the desiccated bits of adult life which teachers have to offer" (p. 195). But how are such conflictual relationships stabilized? Waller's answer, bor- rowed from Simrnel, is that dominance relations become relatively stable because the relationship is more emotionally important to the superior than to the subordinate. Superiors invest their personalities in the leadership role, while subordinates disinvest in their subordinate roles. If subordi- nates can limit the meaning of the subordinated role for themselves, and invest their personalities in more gratifying roles elsewhere, they can tolerate being subordinated: "Subordination is bearable because it is meaningless" (p. 193).
Students, following this principle, empty the teacher's dictates of meaning
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by obeying mechanically, laughing them off, and investing themselves else- where in their own activities (p. 196). They "suck the juice from the orange of conformity before rendering it to the teacher" (p. 384). Teachers can use this principle, however, to help maintain dominance by accentuating their so- cial distance from students, for this reduces the emotional cost of compliance by making it impersonal. Waller viewed the teacher "manner," such as the flat affect often seen in classrooms, as coming from this need to keep leadership formal and impersonal in order for dominance to succeed.
This is the dry, matter-of-fact, formal procedure of the classroom, a hu- man intercourse which gives nothing and asks nothing of personalities, but is always directed at the highly intellectualized matter to be stud- ied. . . . If it is rarely interesting, it is bearable because it is impersonal. (P 280)
Superior-subordinate tensions can be softened in other ways as well. Here Waller gives the familiar advice that one start out strict and formal and only later (not until Christmas?) ease up and allow a personal relationship to de- velop. The reason is that the personal relationships that develop early if one is too informal will be in conflict with institutionalized dominance relations that must appear at some point; better to have personal relationships develop around the formal role so they are not inconsistent with it. While this advice, along with the more general injunction to maintain social distance, sounds like the familiar recommendation that officers not fraternize with enlisted men, Waller manages to breathe new meaning into the recommendation by showing how social distance functions emotionally in the relationship. The whole analysis may apply best in hierarchical schools, such as military acade- mies, but if Waller is correct it should also apply whenever there is a strong conflict of interest between teacher and taught, such as in some urban schools. Emotional costs due to the personalization of dominance would help account for the frequent failure of middle-class styles of leadership in such settings.
Waller also considered the traits that make for successful teachers, such as those relating to their social status, verbal and non-verbal behavior, and their overall personalities. Even here he managed to invest a conventional analysis with depth. Rather than treating age, social class, and gender as external status characteristics that have consequences simply because of their association with stereotyped abilities, or as variables that predict success for unknown reasons, he considered more deeply how a person's place in life may affect her or his ability to take on the teacher role. Consider what it means to be "young" from a social-relational standpoint, for instance. Those who are "young" in these terms are not yet established in the community or with them- selves. Such teachers are likely to be unable to maintain social distance be-
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 11
tween themselves and their students because they are emotionally like their students and need to "make it" with some group. Having little support in the wider adult community they will want to participate and get caught up in the social interaction of their students. The result, at least in the coercive situa- tions Waller analyzed, is that they become competitors with their own stu- dents, and, having gotten personal with one another, increase the pain of com- pliance.
The teacher . . . who comes to be involved in the social life of students . . . pays in the students' world for the crime of being a teacher and in the teachers' for the sacrilege of being friendly with students. . . . Trying to reconcile friendship and authority, he ends by losing both. (p. 213)
Overall, Waller's analysis of the teacher-student relationship-which we have only skimmed here-is concerned with what can be done to survive in a factory system of schooling. What this principally requires is a clear under- standing of one's own and others' roles in such a system of dominance, and the death of the illusion that it is otherwise. Once this is understood, one can "do" factory teaching and learning with lessened psychic cost and unpleasant- ness, and maybe even personalize it. This was not how Waller thought things ought to be, but it was how he thought they were.
What Teaching Does to Teachers
Perhaps the most poignant part of Waller's analysis concerned what teach- ing does to teachers.
Teaching is a boomerang that never fails to come back to the hand that threw it. . . . Between good teaching and bad there is a great difference where students are concerned, but none in this, that its most pronounced effect is upon the teacher. . . . Teaching . . . whittles its followers to con- venient size and seasons them to suit its taste. (p. 375)
Waller was not keen on the results of teaching's survival lessons. Teachers have "a certain inflexibility and unbendingness," a "stiff and formal manner . . . marked by reserve," a kind of petty dignity that "consists of an abnormal concern over a restricted role and the restricted but well-defined status that goes with it." They have a "didactic manner, the authoritative manner, the flat, assured tones of voice that . . . are bred in the teacher by his dealings in the school room, where he rules over the petty concerns of children as a Jehovah none too sure of himself." Teachers tend to be prim in dress and manner, with "a set of the lips, a look of strain, a certain kind of smile, a studied mediocrity, a glib mastery of platitude" (pp. 382-83). Beyond this is a certain lack of
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enthusiasm, a stiffness of mind, and a constrained or partially-paralyzed per- sonality. He mentions a few good traits inculcated by teaching, such as a cer- tain patience and fairness, but the overall characterization is negative.
This characterization is consistent with Waller's analysis of the teacher's role as one involving the maintenance of control under precarious conditions. In such situations, teachers must use their own personalities and manners to maintain dominance. They must adopt a manner of control, but this manner is likely to be an uncertain or wary one, like petty Napoleons. Of course, to be successful, rather than mere martinets, teachers need more than this. They must quickly alternate roles as needed, becoming a friend or parent for one moment, an authority figure the next ("The successful teacher is one who knows how to get on and off his high horse rapidly," p. 385). While such flexibility may modulate the usual posture, Waller feared that the long-term effects of the role of petty autocrat usually overwhelmed them.
This gloomy analysis of the effects of teaching on teachers is certainly one- sided, but it raises interesting questions. One can imagine comparative studies of occupational socialization based on this analysis that would compare the effects of teaching to other occupations. Other studies could compare the ef- fects of relatively precarious teaching positions, with relatively secure ones, such as inner-city schools versus private universities. In this way, Waller's somewhat exaggerated approach could open up interesting lines of research. Certainly, Waller's broad focus on the teacher's character is more interesting than the usual performance-oriented consideration of occupational social- ization.
Conclusions
Evident throughout The Sociology of Teaching is a tension between schools as static dominance structures and schools as dynamic processes of social interaction. To his credit, Waller did not let one or the other of these views predominate. If his pessimistic side saw schools as structurally deterministic despotisms, his idealistic side focused on the contingent possibilities of par- ticular situations. Schools may be formal dominance structures, but practical control depends on relational dynamics. Because he was able to take structure and process as interrelated aspects of schooling, Waller's analysis is much more interesting than structural-functional or conflict-theoretical accounts, which tend to see the operation of schools as structurally determined, or con- temporary interactional accounts, that tend to ignore structural tensions.
Waller saw the pathologies of schooling as resulting from "institutional- ism." Institutional means become ends in themselves, something to which one must conform, rather than tools for lively purposes. And those in schools,
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 13
such as teachers and administrators, often became self-serving in-groups rather than true civil servants. The result is that schools become factories rather than "social organisms." Waller's proposed remedy, drawn from Dewey (1916), was a more "natural" form of schooling in which children would pro- ceed through a series of social situations and activities, each one shaping them for the next in an intended, but unforced way. Whether or not this suggestion for reform was realistic, it is clear that Waller wanted an "organic" life of the school and the unforced growth of children to take precedence over mechani- cal and self-defensive concerns.
Considered as a whole, The Sociology of Teaching is both flawed and unsur- passed. It is flawed by Waller's exaggerated attitude. A frustrated idealist, Wal- ler tended to see schools in hardened terms, viewing himself as a tough and realistic physician who had to reveal cancer where he found it. In contrast to the namby-pamby conventionalism of education, he favored "virile" teachers, like himself, who had sharp opinions and penetrating insights. A certain exag- gerated masculinity is expressed in these attitudes, both in Waller's harshly critical view of schools and in his evident bias against women and homosexu- als. As one friend put it, "Waller was the Teddy Roosevelt of sociology." Con- sistent with this, The Sociology of Teaching has almost nothing to say about gender or race relations, although it has quite a lot to say about generational and (to a lesser degree) social class relations.
On the other hand, Waller's work is unsurpassed as an overall sociology of teaching. Nothing else comes close to bringing one so fully into the lives of teachers. To read the book is to enter into this world in a full and rich way. The Sociology of Teaching is also unsurpassed in providing insights of use to both teachers and to sociologists. Its rich blend of theory and practical ex- ample stimulates just the sort of insight Waller thought important. Whether one sees Waller as an exaggerated Teddy Roosevelt, or just as a man who wanted to help others keep their own roles less tangled than his own, he was a true original. The Sociology of Teaching should continue to be read as a living classic.
Notes 1. Although the book is again out of print, bound photostatic copies can be ordered from Lincoln-Rembrandt Publishers, 7 Elliewood Ave, Charlottesville, VA 22901 (1-800-378-2549).
2. See Joas (1993) for an excellent attempt to bring out the implications of Pragmatism and of Chicago sociology for contemporary sociology. For Waller's anomalous relation to the educa- tional sociologists of his time see Qack (1989). 3. Some analysts have viewed Waller as exploring the "social system" of the school, i.e., the teacher's role set and its functioning. Waller was also after something broader and less structured, however-understanding teachers' lives. Lives are created by the interaction of whole personal- ities and whole environments, not just their professional segments.
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14 RECONSIDERATIONS
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Format and Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media. Edited by Taylor Stoehr. New York: Autonomedia (in press, 1995).
ALAN WIEDER University of South Carolina
When Paul Goodman died in 1972, eulogies appeared in The New York Times and popular journals like The Atlantic Monthly, Dissent, and The New
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