White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Schoolteachers, especially those in grammar and high schools, are the economic proletarians of the professions. These outlying servants of learning form the largest occupational group of the professional pyramid; some 31 per cent of all professional people are schoolteachers of one sort or another. Like other white-collar groups, their number has expanded enormously; they have, in addition, been instrumental, through education, in the birth and growth of many other white-collar groups.

The increase in enrollment and the consequent mass-production methods of instruction have made the position of the college professor less distinctive than it once was. Although its prestige, especially in the larger centers, is considerably higher than that of the public-school teacher, it does not usually attract sons of cultivated upper-class families. The type of man who is recruited for college teaching and shaped for this end by graduate school training is very likely to have a strong plebeian strain. His culture is typically narrow, his imagination often limited. Men can achieve position in this field although they are recruited from the lower-middle class, a milieu not remarkable for grace of mind, flexibility or breadth of culture, or scope of imagination. The profession thus includes many persons who have experienced a definite rise in class and status position, and who in making the climb are more likely, as Logan Wilson has put it, to have acquired ‘the intellectual than the social graces. ' It also includes people of ‘typically plebeian cultural interests outside the field of specialization, and a generally philistine style of life.'