When minor children are entrusted by parents to a school, the parents delegate to the school certain responsibilities for their children, and the school has certain liabilities. In effect, the school and the teachers take some of the responsibility and some of the authority of the parents. The exact extent and nature of this responsibility and power vary from one society to another and from one school system to another. This is spelled out to some extent in the law, but much of it is determined by local custom and practice.

There is, of course, a relation between the age of the child on the one hand and the teacher’s responsibility and liability for it on the other. The young child must obey the teacher, and the teacher may use the methods expected and tolerated in the community to manage the child’s behaviour. Furthermore, the child’s physical safety is entrusted to the school and to the teacher, who thus become legally liable for the child’s safety, insofar as negligence can be proved against them.

In the matter of corporal or physical punishment, local attitudes establish a wide range of expected and permissible behaviour on the part of the teacher. In most parts of the world, young children may be punished by a limited infliction of physical pain at the hands of the teacher or school principal, using a paddle, wooden ruler, or whip of one kind or another. But there are some systems and cities that explicitly bar a teacher from using corporal punishment. This seems most common in large cities; the teacher in a rural or small-city school is more apt to be expected to use physical measures for managing pupil behaviour. As students become older, their behaviour is less apt to be managed by physical measures, and they are more likely to receive detention or be suspended from classes or expelled from school. This is the common last resort in the upper years of the secondary school and in the university.

Another facet of the doctrine of in loco parentis is seen in the relation between parents and teachers with respect to the promotion of pupils and to their counselling or guidance. Parent and teacher may be in conflict about the best procedures to use with a pupil. Shall this pupil be promoted from a fifth to a sixth year class or be “kept back” to repeat the year’s work? This decision is generally seen as the responsibility of the school, though the parents may be brought in for consultation. If the parents object to the school’s decision, what rights and powers do they have? May they see the school’s records on their child? May they examine the pupil’s examination papers or other school work? The answers to these questions are more fixed in some countries than in others, but in general, the school’s authority is supported in these matters.

A more difficult problem is presented by a student, generally an adolescent, who is having serious problems with school performance or school behaviour. He or she is sent to the school counsellor, who may find the student in need of therapeutic counselling and proceeds to counsel the student. Must the counsellor secure prior consent from the parents? Must the counsellor disclose to the parents what he or she learns about or from the student in confidence? Perhaps the counsellor concludes that a part of the student’s difficulty is caused by the parents. Must the counsellor tell this to the parents? Is the counsellor intruding on the privacy of the parents by asking the student about his or her relations with them or by listening if the student volunteers such information? This is terra incognita for the teaching profession and has become something of an issue in the places where personal counselling is regarded as part of the school’s responsibility.

At the level of higher education, the doctrine of in loco parentis does not present as much of a problem for the teacher, since students, even though they may be legally minors, are presumed to be more responsible individuals. But the university may have a problem in relation to the local police or city government. May university property—including classrooms in which teachers are trying to teach—be regarded as private property, with police and other outside persons barred unless they are explicitly asked for help? The question (and others like it) has no clear and unequivocal answer.

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 an individual 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 advisers on local and state problems of health, water supply, transportation, or the use and conservation of natural resources. A university teacher who takes sides on controversial economic or political issues may expect counterpressures to have him or her discharged, and the institution may or may not be supportive 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 who 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 or her a better teacher. Only a university professor teaching graduate students who themselves are being trained for scholarship is working at the frontier of knowledge, with the 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.