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Many teachers have come to see themselves as casualties in a losing battle for learning and order in an indulgent age. Society does not support them, though it expects them to compensate in the classroom for racial prejudice, economic inequality and parental indifference. Says American School Board Journal Managing Editor Jerome Cramer: "Schools are now asked to do what people used to ask God to do." The steady increase in the number of working mothers (35% work full time now) has sharply reduced family supervision of children and thrown many personal problems into the teacher's lap, while weakening support for the teacher's efforts. Says Thomas Anderson, 31, who plans to quit this month after teaching social studies for seven years in Clearwater, Fla.: "I know more about some of my kids than their mothers or fathers do."
A teacher's view, in short, of why teachers cannot teach is that teachers are not allowed to teach. "The teacher today is expected to be mother, father, priest or rabbi, peacekeeper, police officer, playground monitor and lunchroom patrol," says David Imig, executive director of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. "Over and above that, he's supposed to teach Johnny and Mary how to read." Adds Edith Shain, a veteran kindergarten teacher at the Hancock Park School in Los Angeles: "The teacher doesn't know who she has to please. She's not as autonomous as she once was."
In the past 15 years the number of teachers with 20 years or more experience has dropped by nearly half. Four out of ten claim they plan to quit before retirement. In 1965 more than half of America's teachers told polltakers they were happy in their work. Now barely a third say they would become teachers if they had to make the choice again.
For many teachers, whether to leave their profession is not seen as a question of choice, or economics, but as a matter of emotional necessity. The latest pedagogic phenomenon is something called "teacher burnout." It is a psychological condition, produced by stress, that can result in anything from acute loss of will to suicidal tendencies, ulcers, migraine, colitis, dizziness, even the inability to throw off chronic, and perhaps psychosomatic, colds.
This spring the first national conference on teacher burnout was held in New York City. Surprisingly, the syndrome seems nearly as common in small towns and well-off suburbs as in big cities. The National Education Association has already held more than 100 local workshops round the country to help teachers cope with the problem, which University of California Social Psychologist Ayala Pines defines as "physical, emotional and attitudinal exhaustion." Last March, Stress Consultant Marian Leibowitz held a burnout seminar in Edwardsville, Ill. (pop. 11,982). It drew a paying audience of 250 to a hall big enough for only 100.