28th May 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Academic Prof Jennifer Coates has recently highlighted the way in which school pupils address their teachers as ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’, pointing out the inequality inherent in the practice. ‘Sir’ was historically reserved for Knights, and adopted by people to address their fathers and teachers as a sign of respect. Yet the equivalent ‘Ma’am’ is rarely heard in classrooms, with ‘miss’ (even for married teachers) being the norm. Coates has traced this back to the time pre-1940s when women school teachers were not permitted to teach after they were married. Although such sexist traditions are long gone, their remnants endure in the school traditions that we take forward today. This got me thinking about private tuition, a relatively new industry, and how we might establish new pedagogic norms.
The first point to make is that I know of no tutors who insist on being called ‘sir’, ‘miss’, ‘ma’am’, or Mr or Mrs X. Tutors usually teach one-one, and these days it seems daft to maintain formalities under those circumstances. The majority of tutors go by their first name, no matter their age, or the age of their students. Would they change this if they were teaching more than one student? Probably not. How about a classroom full of students? Scaling the issue up like this highlights the issue as it remains today. Calling teachers by their first names implies a degree of informality which is deemed inappropriate for schools. It is thought to undermine authority and discipline. But, as Coates points out, there is nothing more undermining for women teachers than to be referred to by their students as ‘miss’.
There aren’t many tutors who feel that allowing students to call them by their first name undermines their authority in any way, and extending this to schools is not an incomparable idea. In Sweden, which has one of the world’s most successful education systems, students call their teachers by the first name. It does not imply that the student has little respect for their teachers, but it creates an environment in which respect is based on more than the distance created between teacher and student by the use of titles such as sir and miss.