For the past five decades, educators have been debating over whether teaching can be considered a profession. Studies have investigated theories of professionalisation; consensus has not been reached on how a profession should be defined. This conceptual paper explores the definition and characteristics of a profession justifying why teaching qualifies to be a profession. The paper argues that teaching is a professional career where an individual is held accountable through a series of tests, assessments and tools to gauge the achievement of students and their learning. Teaching is a partnership between schools, community, and parents to help children succeed in their academic careers. Each time a teacher has exposure to a student they have the opportunity to provide building blocks for students to take with them to new studies.

The teaching profession has been transformed in the last century in terms of its approaches and structures, such as its instructional methods and learning settings. Such transformations affect the motivations that promote choosing it as a career. Recent studies conducted on the reasons for choosing the teaching profession have been carried out with preand inservice teachers’ perspectives. The current study explores similar issues within broader views in terms of prospective teachers’ personal views about two essential facets: “Prevailing views that teacher candidates hold about the profession”; “If any correlation exists between reasons for choosing teaching as a career and their disciplines”. Participants were asked to identify their teaching philosophies and reasons for determining this career path in college. The data collection process took place between 2012 and 2014. A total of 253 preservice teachers enrolled in teacher preparation programs agreed to participate in the study....

Profession is the phenomenon of vital activity created by division of labor that social, economical and technological factors require. Teaching profession has originated from the social and economical changes that have arisen in societies and can be described as " a professional occupational group of education sector possessing social, cultural, economical, scientific and technological dimensions ". Profession of teaching is based upon a specialization on a certain field, teaching skills, didactics and some certain personal characteristics that the profession requires. There is a close relation between the fact that individuals who select teaching profession possess the knowledge of subject matter, teaching skills and suitable personality traits and whether the mission which is attributed to this profession is successfully fulfilled.

This was a seminar paper written and presented for a PhD course seminar in pedagogy in early 2022; I advance the argument that vocations are to be identified with singular virtues or dispositions at their core (assuming that vocations all ought to be virtuous), and that the teaching vocation is chiefly associated with what ancients and Christians called studiositas; the discussion touches many topics related to education, teaching, students, careers, and the like, but the paper puts forward a logical argument for the position. The paper was to be robust, but not overly technical, and so my style and documentation follows that directive. I post it here as it may especially be helpful for graduate students thinking about their futures.

The unprecedented transformations which took place in the last few decades in contemporary society impose a permanent revision of the training methods of the future teachers. On the European and international level, we notice a change in the perception of the teaching profession. There is a more acute problem of focusing on the qualification at standards of higher quality in their preparation through the assimilation of key skills. From this point of view, the institutions of higher learning have great responsibility in the training of professionals in the didactic field, so that they can accumulate the skills which are sufficient and necessary to continuous training, according to the principle of lifelong learning. The orientations towards the professionalization of the teaching profession impose a training level of the learners which can adapt to social changes, and to the transformations at the level of the profession through permanent accumulation in lifelong learning.

My endeavor in this thesis is to discuss why teaching is not, and has never been considered, part of the true professions. Although much rhetoric is aimed at classifying teachers as true professionals and the teaching field as a true profession, the historical, sociological, and societal means that govern the ideological foundation of a true profession are lacking in the field of education. By using a historical, sociological, philosophical, and linguistic analysis of the words “true profession”, along with “unions”, private teaching organizations, etc., I am able to demonstrate not only why teaching is not a profession, but that teaching will never be a profession, even when the discourse for teachers insist that they are “professional”. It will be such unless the education system as we currently know it ceases to exist and is replaced with a completely different model. Therefore, I will attempt to create a new classification for the field of teaching besides that of a “profession”.