The Work and Lives of Teachers

offers a simple but original argument: that the cultural attitudes toward the teaching profession measurably influence how students perform. Cohen uses both ethnographic portraits and personal accounts from teachers for several countries to explore the meaning and value of teaching worldwide.

This study includes the ways in which teachers in these countries are educated, recruited, compensated, and perceived by parents, students, administrators, and the culture at large. Teachers'' voices, so rarely heard in international educational studies, are front and center here, highlighting the daily work in the classroom and the pleasures and struggles of engaging in today''s teaching profession.

The lesson, briefly stated, is that societies are only as good as the people who teach in them.