This time of year, we high school teachers are busy bringing our courses to a close while trying to scrape together the state Legislature’s required 60 hours of “professional development.” Onerous as that 60 is, such language provides teachers some implicit assurance that at least our frenetic year-end activities are those of professionals.
But would that inference really be based in anything more than a need to dignify our status? Is high school teaching really a profession?
On questions like this, it is generally sound practice to consult the Greeks, who always seem to have surveyed a territory first. In some of Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates does in fact cover edifying ground. He bases several of his arguments on the strong distinction between what he calls a craft and other less knowledgeable kinds of work.
To Socrates, a practitioner of a craft must know more than what procedural steps to follow to produce a desired result. He also must be able to explain the sources of a given procedure’s effect and the logic of its applicability. Classical Greek writing often singles out medicine as the prime example of a craft. Even in antiquity, the Greeks thought a good doctor should be able “to explain precisely why and how a treatment works,” as classicist Martha Nussbaum puts it. The point was to designate a kind of work that is grounded in conceptual mastery of a field of knowledge. Without this, according to Socrates, work is not craft.

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