The need to transform the teaching process and to change it into a public trust also had the corollary, in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century context, of "masculinizing" it. A clear preference for hiring male teachers, often as an unstated assumption that the new brand of teacher would be male, was apparent in many teaching reforms. Even if theoretical discussions on the influence of early environment on the child's moral and intellectual development generally recognized the importance of domestic maternal education, once the child left home, teaching usually was assumed to be a male prerogative. This was in part a product of the increasing emphasis upon a gender division of labor structured on the polarity between the home and the workplace, the private and the public, that was so central to the evolving ideology. Nevertheless, the issue was a vexed one, and no completely satisfactory handling of the gender question in the realm of education was forthcoming. As schools became increasingly "public" and political in character, it seemed only obvious that teachers would be male, especially insofar as their pupils would be boys who had to be educated to be active citizens of the world.
Daughters were more of a problem. On the one hand, girls needed to be trained in such a manner as to best prepare them for their presumably domestic futures. On the other hand, society had a stake in their training as future mothers, especially as future mothers of sons on whom they would have substantial influence. Furthermore, the theoretical moral exaltation of motherhood also ran up against the contradictory claims that in practice many mothers of the lower classes were defaulting on their duties by absenting themselves from home to work, or by not managing their homes and their children properly. The paradoxes raised by the gender assumptions behind the school reform were thus substantial, but the general preference for male teachers remained.
The early reform epoch witnessed the disappearance of many of those informal forms of teaching—the dame schools, the neighborhood ABC schools, and the like—which were often run by women. These were effectively decertified, as access to teaching posts became more restrictive. The pattern of deliberate recruitment of men into the teaching profession appears in most of the reform programs throughout Western Europe. The pupils of the countless new normal schools were overwhelmingly male.
Several programs followed from the redefinition of the goals of teaching. First, there was an attempt to wrest control over the hiring and supervision of teachers from local communities or parents and put it into the hands of elites or their political representatives. Second, measures were taken to train teachers and influence their recruitment into teaching posts. Third, reformers established mechanisms for the better supervision of teachers' conduct both within and outside the classroom. In the process, the social position of the teacher was transformed, and with it the social meaning of going to school.
