The value of and values in the work of teachers in Estonia

Introduction

I have felt like a valuable person for years. But many new problems have emerged in education. There are fewer kids, there are more broken kids, the salary is decreasing … (Primary school teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1955)

Politicians fight for teachers when it is time to collect votes but when it is time for real work, there are always reasons why they cannot raise salaries and this is why teachers are not valued in society. Estonia has chosen the wrong path. We are such a small nation and we do not have anything other than our intellectual potential. Teachers need to be praised and their salary doubled. (Chemistry teacher, M, Tartu, b. 1931)

Post-socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe have witnessed a shift towards an increasingly market-oriented value regime, together with a reshuffling of the hierarchy of occupations. The media and the elites depicted bankers, entrepreneurs and managers as the winners in the new social order in contrast to the industrial working class and rural populations, who were generally seen as backward and ‘dangerous’ because they followed the values that did not correspond to the hegemonic market ideology (Annist, 2011; Kesküla, 2015; Stenning, 2005). The degree to which certain groups have embraced free market ideology determined whether they are grouped together with the elites or orientalized as the internal Other (Buchowski, 2006). Paradoxically, such othering did not only involve the working class but also middle-class professions such as teachers.

The reforms introducing the liberal market economy as well as the related educational reforms were implemented very rapidly after 1991 when Estonia became independent. This brought about a new value regime, while teachers continued to reproduce values that did not correspond to the prevailing hegemonic neoliberal values. As the interview quotes above illustrate, Estonian teachers often feel that they are not valued in society because they are not respected and paid enough. If teachers resist market values and continue to reproduce an alternative moral code, then why are they simultaneously talking about pay and conflating monetary values with societal and professional non-material values? This article argues that these values are part of the same continuum and the teaching profession highlights that especially clearly. Teachers are key actors in the struggle to determine and reproduce what value is in the wider society and their labour becomes a major site of contestation of which values prevail.

This article is based on 24 life history interviews with Estonian teachers, combining sociological and anthropological theories and methodologies. It shows that labour theory of value, theories of professionalism or anthropological theories of value alone cannot explain the crucial role of the teaching profession and the value of the teachers’ labour in situations of rapid political and economic change. Combining these theoretical traditions helps to explain what the teachers themselves are pointing to: the unity of material and symbolic labour and the importance of both material and symbolic rewards.

Educational reforms in Estonia

Alongside general changes in society, the Estonian education system has undergone major transformations, accompanied by fundamental changes in values. During the perestroika period in the late 1980s, teachers initiated the movement to disconnect the national education system from Soviet Union-wide system. The basis of this new education system was expected to be humanist and democratic in opposition to the Soviet authoritarian order. The early 1990s was a period of contradictory reforms, decentralization, liberalization and building up an independent education system and curricula. In this creative chaos, several paths of development for the education system, as well as the general model of society, were considered.

At the general political level, the path to a swift implementation of a market economy was quickly consolidated. Old communists were purged from the government, liberal pro-market parties repeatedly won the elections as the free market and neoliberalism, directly inspired by Milton Friedman’s writings and Margaret Thatcher’s policies, was seen as the only successful path for development. Today, as Harvey (2005: 3) states: ‘neoliberalism has […] become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world.’ Neoliberalism also became the hegemonic way of thinking in Estonia.

By the late 1990s, the general rise of market ideology was also reflected in education policy. In 1997, state exams at the end of upper secondary school were introduced, resulting in the publication of league tables. This meant that parents could choose between schools for their children and became much more powerful actors than they had been before. The change confirmed the position of the so-called elite schools, which were publicly funded but could select their students based on entry exams, mostly admitting urban upper-middle class children who had the opportunities to prepare for admission exams. These schools always appeared at the top of the league table.

While teachers in Estonia are generally satisfied with their school and only 16 per cent would change school, and the prevailing majority would not change their profession (only 10% of teachers regret having chosen the profession), they are highly dissatisfied with society’s attitudes towards the teaching profession (Loogma et al., 2010). Only 14 per cent of teachers believe that society values teachers’ work sufficiently (Loogma et al., 2010; OECD, 2014: 407–8; Übius et al., 2014: 140). During the teachers’ strikes in 2003 and 2012, their main slogans have related to demands for a salary increase. Although teachers are paid by the state as in the Soviet era, and teachers’ salaries have incrementally risen, they have remained slightly below the mean salary. By the time of the interviews in 2010, teachers’ salaries were close to the national average, which was € per month (Haridus- ja Teadusministeerium, 2014). In 2010, when the interviews were conducted, Estonia was hit by the economic crisis. The crisis meant unemployment increased from 5.6 per cent in 2008 to 14.4 per cent in 2010 (Statistics Estonia, 2016). The crisis brought about the first openly critical voices about Estonia’s economic model and the blind trust in market forces over ‘softer’ values such as social ties, care and honest labour. In this particular period, questions regarding the value of teachers’ labour again became the central focus.

The approach: value and values of labour

While the interviews were initially conducted to study teachers’ reaction to curriculum change in conjunction with their personal histories, the data gathered pointed to teachers’ strong discourse of talking about the value and values of labour simultaneously. Labour theory of value (Marx, 1867) and concepts of professionalism (Evans, 2008; Freidson, 2001; Hargraves, 2006) therefore become important ways of explaining the value and meaning of teachers’ labour. However, neither of these theories alone could explain why teachers talked about material and non-material values together. The Marxist assumption is that value comes from labour (Marx, 1867). The classical reading of Marx’s labour theory of value sees the exchange value of a product determined by the socially necessary labour time needed to make the product and ‘seeks to explain how profits are made from the production and sale of commodities’ (Vidal et al., 2015: 412). The theory, however, only applies to wage workers who produce tangible objects to a private entrepreneur in a capitalist system and thus do not cover teachers who are state employees seemingly producing no objects that one could sell on the market for profit.

When it comes to teachers’ labour, the feminist critique of Marxist labour theory of value becomes helpful as it focuses also on reproductive work. It suggests that reproductive work produces the labour force for commodity production and is hence creating profit for capitalists despite being mystified as a natural, personal care activity (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Federici, 2012). Harvie (2006) has applied the Marxist feminist critique to teachers, arguing that teachers can be seen as productive workers in the sense that they produce the commodity of labour power through shaping and developing future workers. Through the exploitation of the labour power of students in the future, they create surplus value for capital, in the same way as the domestic labour of caring and nurturing contributes to increasing the labour power of productive labour (Harvie, 2006). While this approach expands the value theory of labour to teachers and sees their work as both productive and reproductive, it does not explain why teachers are talking about both the material and the non-material rewards of their work at the same time.

The anthropological theory of value claims that economic value and non-material values are not opposites to each other but rather part of the same continuum (Graeber, 2001) with potential for ‘transvaluation’ and the dominance of different values in their historical context, challenging the idea of ‘a single telos for the realization of value, even under capitalist social relations’ (Eiss and Pedersen, 2002). Anthropologists have shown that humans do not always aim to maximize their material profit but other aspects of gathering recognition in society might be equally important (Mauss, 2002; Parry and Bloch, 1989). Graeber (2005) argues that value is produced when labour in the broadest sense is being realized in some socially recognized form, which can be both material and symbolic (p. 225). In the capitalist system, where labour becomes an abstract commodity, money is a symbol that signifies the importance of particular work – money becomes the token of value for such work. Unpaid work can be recognized with other tokens; for example, childcare is rewarded with tokens of love and respect. While classical Marxism sees labour time as the basis of value, Graeber’s (2005) significantly wider take emphasizes how value can be both monetary and symbolic and is socially constructed. Taking the feminist approach a step further, he argues that reproductive labour should be seen as productive labour not only in terms of reproducing the labour force in capitalist societies but also as the essence of ‘human creative life’. Rather than seeing himself contradicting the Marxist value theory, he suggests that ‘Capital’ can be read as an attempt of symbolic analysis, asking why, in the capitalist mode of production, the value of labour is represented by wage (Graeber, 2013: 222). This approach is helpful in analysing the labour of teachers whose labour is both productive and reproductive, entailing value and values simultaneously. At the same time, while it explains the connection between value and values, this theory is too general to look at the role of teachers more specifically.

In teachers’ labour, a key aspect is professionalism and professionalization, which both refer to autonomy and recognition from society. Professionalization of teachers can be described as how teachers see their status and standing in society and feel they are seen in the eyes of others (Hargraves, 2006: 674), as a process of struggling for a position in society and the possibility to exercise autonomy and discretion (Evetts, 2002). In the widest sense, professionalism is ‘a set of institutions which permit the members of an occupation to make a living while controlling their own work’ (Freidson, 2001: 105). This approach to professionalism contains both the material aspect of making a living and the non-material aspects of discretionary decision making and respect.

New trends, particularly new patterns of regulation and control of teachers’ work by the state (Adams, 2014), such as New Public Management (NPM), have reduced teachers’ capacity to regulate their work and have diminished their autonomy. This has manifested itself in many ways, including increasing the standardization and de-professionalization of teachers (Hoyle, 2001; Lauder et al., 2006). It has been argued that these tendencies essentially mean a shift in power (Evans, 2008: 21) in favour of parents, students and the bureaucracy and away from teachers (Loogma et al., 2013). This literature on professionalism and increased regulation assumes that teachers struggle to maintain professionalism, battling both the state and the market. Relatively little attention has been given to the question of values and professionals’ autonomy in determining what values count in the wider society and teachers’ expectations of rewards for their labour. This article argues that teachers’ labour is more than a struggle determining the status of their profession. Rather, their professionalism forms a key part of determining what value is in society. Therefore, to understand why teachers as professionals talk about the value and values of their work simultaneously, it is necessary to combine the approaches outlined above.

This analysis starts from three points. Firstly, that once productive and reproductive labour in the widest possible sense are seen as the main source of value creation, mat-erial, monetary value and non-material values in society cease to be opposites but rather represent the same thing. Secondly, tokens are distributed to recognize labour and can be either monetary or symbolic. Thirdly, for their labour, people aim to pursue tokens of value that are recognized in their society, but what is considered of value is contestable. Teachers legitimize their claim to determine what value is through their professionalism. In the following section, the methodology of the research is introduced, followed by the analysis of Estonian teachers’ take on value and values.

Methodology

The initial aim of the project was to understand teachers’ reaction to curriculum change in connection with their life histories and values. The interview was divided into six themed blocks covering: childhood and school memories; choosing the profession and training as a teacher; the start of professional life and the school environment; changes before and after Estonian independence; changes in education policy and curriculum; and, teachers’ expectations of students, colleagues, parents and the school environment. Questions about values were not part of an explicit questionnaire block, but were expressed in general descriptions about how teachers do their work, what they experience in their everyday encounters with other groups in society, as well as answering an explicit question about their perceived social status. The researchers noticed that the teachers were talking about monetary value and values in an interlinked and interchangeable manner, leading to the decision to further explore why this was the case. This led to an inquiry based on the principles of anthropological research where research puzzles grow out of the data. Centred on the theme of values and value of labour, more detailed research questions were formulated. The research questions were as follows:

For data collection, four interviewers conducted 24 semi-structured life history interviews with teachers who were identified through personal networks and snowball sampling in the winter and spring 2009/2010. In order to reduce a bias from such a sampling method, the teachers were selected in order to represent different regions, school types, class backgrounds and language communities, reflecting the structure of the overall teacher population in Estonia. The main bias was that the teachers selected were mostly middle-aged or older to ensure the research included people who had worked in schools during the major educational changes. The oldest teacher in the sample was born in 1931 and the youngest in 1970. Five teachers were born in the 1940s, ten in the 1950s and five in the 1960s. Four teachers worked in so-called elite schools that were situated in the major towns, while others were from ordinary schools. Nine teachers were from rural areas and smaller towns and the rest were from the larger centres, Tallinn and Tartu. Only four teachers were male, reflecting the general picture of overwhelmingly female staff in the teaching profession in Estonia.

The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and two hours. Although the interviewers used the same interview plan, the results may have varied due to the interviewers’ interests in a particular theme or the prior relationship of the interviewer and interviewee. This was to be expected since open-ended, oral history interviews are always an inter-subjective process, where the interviewer also plays a role (Broom et al., 2009; Thompson, 2000). Regular discussions with examples from the interview material and reactions to particular questions between the interviewers helped to align the basic structure of the interviews and topics. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data were then triangulated after three researchers had independently coded all the interviews and identified the different topics and discourses. The researchers then discussed the topics and identified distinct themes and synthesized them into main patterns. The current authors participated in designing the interview guide, interviewing, coding and analysis phases. Interviews were conducted in Estonian and translated into English by the authors. Conveying exactly the same meaning and tone in translation was achieved through consulting with a native English speaker involved in a similar field of research.

Below, the first section of the empirical data shows how teachers see themselves as professionals who reproduce both the future labour force and human beings with certain values and ethics. The second section describes the shifting value regime and changing expectations by society and parents, showing how society expects teachers to be both customer service staff and a caring and nurturing profession. The third section focuses on the material and non-material tokens rewarded to teachers for their labour showing how certain tokens motivate teachers to keep working while the lack of others is sensed as a challenge to their professionalism. The data presented demonstrate that teachers talk about material and non-material values simultaneously because their professionalism becomes a key site for struggle in a rapidly changing societal situation.

Estonian teachers’ self-image as productive and reproductive workers

In order to understand the nature of the value struggle of professionals in more detail, it is first important to understand how teachers understand themselves as professionals and what their professionalism consists of. This section shows how teachers’ self-image reflects how they see the value and meaningfulness of their profession, and how teachers see themselves producing value and values simultaneously.

The interviews show that teachers talked about a calling which is related to caring and about a particular ethos that they transmit and reproduce when teaching. In descriptions of everyday work they described transgressing the boundaries of what is expected from them by the state and contributing more time, energy and love than their employer or formal professional standards would expect of them. Some teachers described how they never wanted to be anything other than a teacher, how they loved their job, how being with children and teaching them was the worthiest activity of all, despite hard moments. This constituted the caring aspect of their professionalism, linked to a particular calling to be a teacher.

Besides caring, as part of their professionalism, teachers express a very strong value system that they want to reproduce, ignoring the bureaucratic prescriptions of describing the learning outcomes of every lesson:

I do not think about competences or learning outcomes when I prepare my lessons. I think that these pupils need to become human beings. And it is very good to teach through history, about certain values, what can happen if people behave in a certain way … (History teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1957)

Often, teachers referred to the values of a particular school, not always aligned with government policies, emphasizing that it was not all about the new societal values of marketization and competition. Rather, as some teachers in both the country and the city put it, treating one another with respect, supporting and not judging weaker students, and being ‘humane’. One teacher from an elite school noted that reproducing and teaching certain values was not only part of their profession but should also be more explicit in textbooks:

I do not think that every lesson should be explicitly about learning particular values. But in every lesson they should develop certain work habits, convictions. Considering other people, being empathetic, these have to be a part of every lesson. (Chemistry teacher, M, Tartu, b. 1931)

The teachers believed that they were transmitting values of empathy, considerateness and being good and moral people, and that these values were not based on the dominant market-derived values. At the same time, they were aware of the world outside and emphasized that students needed to leave school with certain skills that will help them find employment. They emphasized that it was important to give students tools to use in later life, to make sure that they can become independent and contribute to society. They saw their role as central in society, as professionals reproducing the nation and its intellectual potential, indicating that the elite did not always share the same view.

Aware of the role of their profession, they emphasized both their reproductive role of care and nurture as well as the productive role of giving certain skills to the future labour force. Thus, when talking about their practices, they saw themselves producing both value and values, in the same manner that they expected monetary value and values like respect and professionalism back from society. They saw their profession grounded in an ethic that should give them the autonomy to decide what the skills and values to be reproduced were. As indicated above, sometimes they were in conflict with the state, which demanded concrete deliverable ‘learning outcomes’. Furthermore, teachers sensed a conflict with wider societal values, and the tendency to give more power to other social groups such as parents.

The shifting value regime: changing expectations of society and parents

Central to the argument is that in situations of rapid societal change, teacher professionalism becomes a site of struggle to determine what value is. This section analyses how teachers perceive the new expectations that society has towards them, exploring how both the productive and the reproductive side of teachers’ labour is expected by society but not in ways that teachers see as central to their professionalism.

The teachers spoke about a general shift in the value regime towards competition and the market. In the interviews conducted in 2009/2010, teachers noticed the new values of the market and competition becoming more dominant than they had been in the late Soviet and early independence periods. In schools, the first indicator of the shifting values that teachers noted related to their students. Teachers were worried about the increasing number of students who did not appreciate education and thought that only money was important. This attitude was especially prevalent in the boom years before the 2008 economic crisis. As a teacher from a socially deprived Russian-speaking area explained, students realized that it was possible to make money in sectors such as construction, and did not think they needed education anymore. Students were perceived as having very material values and high salary demands, without necessarily having the requisite skills and abilities. Teachers sometimes felt that they needed to change the values of society in general:

The reason why teachers are not valued is related to the general values of Estonian society: material values, personal success, and becoming rich are emphasized a bit too much. And the school has to tilt at windmills if these general values in society are not right. And just raising the salary does not help here; it has to be a more complex change. (History teacher, F, Tallinn elite school, b. 1956)

Alongside with the emergence of material values, the second trend that teachers noticed was competition. Competition was seen as one of the emerging values related to the increasing importance being given to market forces, and competition was seen as taking place between students, between teachers themselves and between schools. Competition was not only seen in society in general but also as a result of educational policy in national exams. National exam results for school leavers were used to create school league tables, which were published and painstakingly analysed in the national media (Kesküla et al., 2012). Teachers experienced extra pressure to make sure that their students were performing well in order to maintain or improve the school’s position in the league tables. Poor results would mean reprimands from the school management and potentially a decline in new student enrolments, as parents interpreted the tables as an indicator of the teachers’ and school’s success rate. Teachers expressed disappointment about mixed messages where the management stated that results were not relevant, but then punished teachers if their students had not done well in exams. As a result, only successful students were noticed, indicating the wider trends in society:

Even when I tell a child that I saw how hard they were working, society still disapproves when the results are not great. For children, poor results are considered a failure. No one teaches them that it is a part of the learning process. (Psychology teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1949)

Teachers described the expectations from society and parents towards their labour as falling into two contradictory categories, both related to the increasing dominance of the market: the teacher as a customer service employee, or the teacher as the fulfiller of all reproductive roles.

Firstly, the category of teacher as a customer service employee was mostly prominent in narratives about demanding parents. Several teachers felt that they did not have authority anymore, that parents seemed to know better what a teacher should be doing and that the parents’ demands were often unrealistic. These narratives were often related to parental dissatisfaction about their child’s grades and blaming the poor results on the teachers. Teachers felt especially pressured when parents contacted the school management to voice their dissatisfaction. Some teachers concluded that parents have ‘the customer is the king’ attitude, reflecting the general shifting values in society, including the NPM as a way of applying business sector management ideas to schools (Thrupp and Hursh, 2006):

A mother got so angry with me that she wrote four complaint letters a year. I was so devastated that the school management believed that if the mother writes all the time, there must be something wrong … (Primary school teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1950)

Secondly, teachers experienced excessively high expectations on their role as educators. This stems from the dual expectations towards a teacher who, on the one hand, is expected to be doing wage labour in a capitalist society and, on the other hand, is expected to carry out the labour of reproduction. While this echoes the self-image of teachers as caring professionals, they felt that they now had to take over the role of the family to an excessive extent. A teacher from an elite school stated that teachers are now expected to be ‘superhuman’ and make up for what society is lacking or cannot manage. Many teachers noted that some parents have left to work abroad, leaving the children to manage on their own: ¹

I feel so sad for the children who are left by themselves. The mother raises them by herself or goes to work in Finland. I understand that they need money, but the child has to handle housekeeping and school. And often they cannot cope with all this. (Physics and technology studies teacher, M, small town, b. 1965)

The general mood was that parents expect teachers to take over the role of the home, while parents were busy working abroad, or simply working long days ‘making money’ or commuting. These parents were seen as being disconnected from the school and teachers noticed the lack of family support in terms of student behaviour, lack of respect for teachers and minimal time for or interest in their children’s education, as summarized in this teacher’s comment:

Everyone thinks they know what a teacher needs to do. I have even heard such arguments that the home does not need to raise children − that is what schools are for, that the parents’ duty is to do something else, to earn money. (Geography and biology teacher, F, village, b. 1956)

Therefore, the realities of the market are influencing the work of teachers in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, in a society where money rules, parents expect teachers to behave like customer service staff, and if parents are dissatisfied with the service, they have the right to complain. This sort of attitude indicates that teachers’ work is to produce people and success is measured by good exam results.

The second trend, where the teacher is also expected to do the caring and nurturing, can be interpreted in two ways. The first is the extension of the idea of the teacher as a customer service employee who is expected to deliver an all-inclusive service of producing good exam results as well as providing the care that parents are not willing or able to give. This corresponds to teachers’ self-image of doing both productive and reproductive labour but without the element of professionalism. This is linked to the low prestige of reproductive labour generally, as has been pointed out regarding house work and care work (Acker, 1990; Eisikovits, 1997) and discussions about whether the caring professions can be considered ‘real’ professions (Antikainen et al., 2009; Evans, 2008; Lauder et al., 2006). The caring aspect of teachers’ labour sits uncomfortably with the newly established hierarchy of the value of professions where care and nurture are at the bottom of the hierarchy together with manual labour. The low prestige is further reinforced as such professions are mostly also linked with female labour and the feminization of the teaching profession is a significant issue in Estonia (cf. Übius et al., 2014).

The second interpretation, however, refers to the realities of Estonian society that do not relate so much to the unreasonable demands of parents but indeed significant unemployment and the need of many parents to earn money abroad or in other areas of Estonia. This is a particularly grave problem in rural areas, and when the parent is away, the logical solution seems to be that the school and the teacher takes over the nurturing and caring role. Although teachers presented themselves as nurturing and caring people, they preferred to do this on their own terms and the new situation of missing parents who sometimes demanded too much of the reproductive role from teachers was undermining their professionalism in terms of being able to choose and judge what kind of work they needed to do with the children.

This section showed that teachers sensed the onslaught of material values and increasing competition in society in general. This was expressed in the attitudes of the parents who were demanding more customer service from teachers. Although the reasons behind the parents’ demands are complex and indicate shifts in the labour market as well as shifting values, they result in challenging the professional autonomy of teachers.

The tokens of value and the lack of such tokens

As indicated above, teachers’ labour is related both to material (money) and non-material tokens of value (recognition, trust, gratitude). The teachers made a distinction between non-material tokens of value from students and from society. This section shows that students were seen as a positive factor that helped teachers carry on, while teachers felt they did not receive recognition from wider society or parents.

Teachers spoke of seeing their students’ success as being the main motivator, a symbolic token for them in their profession. A mathematics teacher noted that ‘when students start university and I see that they are doing well, I think thank God that it went that way’ (Mathematics teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1952). A small country school teacher described how she had to work with children who were ‘not especially talented’, and encourage them to dance or participate in plays because there was no one else; and then, eventually, these not so promising students developed courage and skills because they simply had to do things that they would not get an opportunity to do in city schools. Therefore, student success is one of the greatest non-monetary token motivators for teachers, and, moreover, helps them believe that their labour is valued. It is important to emphasize that monetary tokens were closely linked, almost interchangeably or convertibly to non-monetary tokens such as respect and recognition. This close relationship meant that when factoring in recognition from students, the positive feedback compensated for the low pay:

Because I have young people around me, I hope that I will stay younger myself. It is so positive that my students have gone to study elsewhere in the world. This work is something for the soul. I do not measure it like an accountant, according to an hourly rate. I could never do that, and then there is no point becoming a teacher if you start to think like this. There will be better times and if the situation with pay is currently such, I will do some extra work on the side, I will manage somehow. (Music teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1970)

The situation was different when it came to material and non-material recognition from society in general. The low pay was seen as an obvious sign that teachers’ work was not valued by the elites and society in general. As a psychology teacher from Tallinn bluntly put it, due to low pay, ‘only those who had a rich husband or who were single and had no family to support, could afford to be teachers’. She continued the argument saying that the low salary also affected parents’ attitudes, who would not respect a low-paid worker.

The low pay and low non-material tokens, such as respect and authority, were very closely intertwined. For teachers, the fact that Estonian politicians have done nothing to raise teachers’ salaries was directly linked to the fact that they did not value teachers’ work. They believed that this lack of recognition was partly due to a low awareness of the amount of work teachers do for society more generally.

Teachers described in great detail how many hours it takes them to teach lessons, prepare for lessons, correct and mark tests. They felt that the salary they received for the number of hours they had to put in could not be justified compared to other occupational groups: ‘You work all day and earn the same as a shop assistant’ (Primary school teacher, F, Tallinn elite school, b. 1955). Furthermore, their workload was not recognized in non-material terms either:

After the workday, I often feel as if I have lifted heavy logs. I lie on the couch, too tired to move a finger or a toe. But the heaviness of this work is invisible to the rest of the world. I often meet people in town who would say, lucky you, the school day finishes at 3 p.m. But then I go home and start another workday. (Geography teacher, F, small town, b. 1957)

The teachers felt that they received non-material recognition when they see the success of their students (although not necessarily from parents or society), and this assures them that they are doing the right and moral thing. Furthermore, student success in university or the labour market signified teachers’ recognition of their material contribution to the labour force as well as the symbolic rewards. These rewards even compensated for low pay. Where the perceived attitude of society was concerned, however, low pay was evidence that teachers’ labour was not recognized and further reinforced the lack of non-material recognition. Salary, as well as respect, go hand in hand. Moral and monetary values are not convertible but the lack of monetary values is compensated for by non-monetary values through recognition from students. With regard to recognition from society, both monetary and non-monetary tokens are needed since the market ideology assumes that low salary indicates low autonomy and professionalism.

The lack of recognition was not seen as just a personal problem for individual teachers, but as something more structural. Most of all, it contributed to the low number of graduates wanting to become teachers and to new teachers not staying in their positions for long. Teaching was seen as being in deep crisis because of this lack of recognition:

Those [teachers] who held the whole thing up, are mostly dead by now, surely from overwork. But life will put politicians in such a situation that they will have to start recognizing this job which has considerable responsibility … I believe the economic crisis sobered people up a lot, and confirmed the important role of the teacher. (Estonian language and literature teacher, F, Tallinn, b. 1953)

The quote above emphasizes the value conflict between the political elite who steer society and the teachers who hold on to the idea that the values they aim to reproduce are good and moral ones. In the interviews undertaken during the period the economic crisis hit Estonia, many teachers criticized the pre-crisis dominance of market values. The crisis was expected to shatter the illusion of market values and make way for something more ‘real’. Yet, at the same time, the teachers felt that they may be losing the fight. Notably, one of the contributing factors was the invisibility of the immense workload that teachers take on. Teachers talked about themselves as professionals, sensed that the expectations of parents, the government and general society had changed but nevertheless kept producing the values that they considered were in line with their professionalism. Thus, teacher professionalism was not only about the position of teachers in society, but their tokens and lack of them signified which values are generally appreciated and expected in society and where the value conflict emerges.

Conclusion

This article starts with a puzzle about why Estonian teachers talk about material and symbolic aspects of their work simultaneously. Seeing monetary and non-monetary values as part of the same continuum helps to explain how, in periods where different value regimes clash, teachers are not only fighting for their own position as professionals but to determine what value is in society more generally. With other institutions and social classes such as parents, business and government elites taking over control of the productive and reproductive labour of teachers, they are expected to reproduce the capitalist labour force through nurturing, care and teaching the values of competitiveness and the market.

In response, Estonian teachers keep insisting that they are not fulfilling the orders of customers. They assert that they are simultaneously producing value through giving their reproductive labour to society, and passing on values that they believe are correct. They insist on their autonomy and trust from society to reproduce these values in their students. By transmitting these values which they believe are good and moral, they critique capitalism where the production of human beings is not seen as an end it itself. In the interviews undertaken when the 2008 economic crisis had its full impact on Estonia, teachers were critical of the dominant values and hoped that the sobering effect of the crisis would produce a shift in the value regime. In similar ways to during the 1980s, teachers seem to resist the hegemonic value system, albeit these values probably seem outdated to the elites. Nevertheless, they believe themselves to be losing against the new values of society as they, like the declining working class, are starting to feel worthless or, at least, worth less. They sense how their autonomy and trust from society are diminishing as the state, parents and market principles are taking control.

Such struggles, however, are not only an Estonian or even post-socialist phenomenon as hegemonic neoliberalism penetrates the education system. In other locations, teaching professions also constitute a key group determining what value is. As market values are increasingly dominant, schools and universities as representatives of alternative ideas are often under attack and become a key site to determine whether education is an economic good or a value in itself (Graeber, 2013; Ibrahim, 2011; Rheingans and Hollands, 2013). In such situations, professionalism becomes more than a struggle for the position of an occupational group but central to determining which values prevail in society.

The reason why teachers talk about their professionalism as an autonomy to determine the way they do both productive and reproductive labour, and what tokens they receive for it, cannot be explained by one theoretical approach to labour alone. Combining labour theory of value with its feminist critique and anthropological theory of value, allows a wider understanding of teachers’ labour.

This article has attempted to contribute to the debates on the value of labour in various ways. Firstly, labour theory of value (Marx, 1867) helps to understand how the measure of worth of one’s work can be understood in monetary terms (since value comes from labour) and why teachers saw low salaries as an indicator that their work was worthless. Classical Marxist theories focus on workers employed by private capitalists who are producing a commodity which can be sold for profit by the capitalist. This approach cannot easily be applied to teachers as they are employed by the state and seemingly do not produce commodities. Marxist feminists (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Federici, 2012) have argued that reproductive labour is just as crucial to maintaining capitalism as it is reproducing the labour force. When the future labour force is not only looked after at home but also trained and cared for in kindergartens and schools, teachers’ labour becomes reproductive work (Harvie, 2006). According to such an approach, teachers should be satisfied once their salaries for their labour are satisfactory. As the data from Estonian teachers showed, when teachers talk about their work, they are dissatisfied with both material and symbolic rewards. Applying anthropological theory of value (Graeber, 2001) to teachers’ labour allows the limitations of focusing on monetary rewards as primary tokens for productive and non-productive labour to be overcome. Material and symbolic values are not opposites, signifying the impersonal capitalist world of labour and the ethical and intimate sphere of care and morality, but rather part of the same continuum. This helps to explain why teachers demand both monetary and non-monetary tokens of recognition for their labour. Nevertheless, anthropological theory of value is too general to look at teachers’ labour specifically. One of the key non-monetary tokens in this context is professionalism, signifying teachers’ autonomy to transmit the values that they deem relevant.

Post-socialist societies with their rapid changes in the 1990s offered spaces for discussions, experiments and creations of new value regimes. In cases such as Estonia, the neoliberal values, signifiers of re-joining the ‘free world’, became hegemonic fairly quickly. Still, such processes are affecting education systems and value systems almost everywhere in the Global North. Therefore, new approaches to understand the labour of key groups in society are required. The concept of teacher professionalism (Evetts, 2013; Freidson, 2001) that has been conceptualized as the prestige and autonomy of teachers, needs to be expanded to not only refer to the autonomy and position of a particular group in a hierarchy of positions but to a freedom and possibilities to determine what value is and to reproduce certain values in society. Combining the concept of professionalism with an anthropological approach to value helps to transcend the idea of teachers as simply an occupational group struggling for status, autonomy and discretion. Combining material and symbolic aspects of labour and reward allows a deeper insight into global changes in hierarchies of values and of professions as well as fundamental questions about which groups in society get to determine what value is.