In all, the thrust of the professional reforms of teaching left the teachers in a new and improved, but hardly enviable position. In practice the reform certainly severed their ties with the local community all over Western Europe. If salaries were rising and the work of the teacher taken more seriously, if classrooms were fuller and teachers equipped with a new kind of training and new credentials, all this came at a high cost. Teachers were left in a peculiarly contradictory position—caught between the needs of the communities they served, the demands of their secular and religious superiors, and their own sense of self in part at least shaped by the training they were now receiving. Teachers who made strenuous efforts to enforce the new regulations about school attendance or teaching standards often paid for their efforts by losing the goodwill of the peasant families who found the older style of teaching more compatible with their needs. In their frustrations with dealing with an often unappreciative local community, teachers sometimes resorted to a kind of partnership with liberal notables nearby or in the state hierarchy, attaching themselves often to opposition movements seeming or even claiming to be in sympathy with popular needs, but often in fact divorced from the people they had to serve.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 70)