The Prestige of Teachers Occupation

Thesis deals with the prestige of the teaching profession. Its main goal is to try to find out how teachers themselves perceive the prestige connected with their profession. The research consisted of in-depth semi-structured interviews with teachers on this issue and their subsequent analysis. It turned out that although teachers occupy on occupational prestige scales regularly top positions within the interviews they spoke about very low prestige connected with their occupation. The thesis also presents and describes in detail the factors based on analysis of interviews which emerged in connection with low self-esteem of teachers in terms of prestige as a major. This mainly concerns the relatively low income and the related lower standard of living, which forces teachers to have a secondary income. Furthermore, the analysis showed that teachers low self-esteem is affected by alleged lower difficulty of faculties of education, difficult assesment of work results and underastimated difficulty of work from the publics point of view. Not forgetting the little influence of educational unions and the lack of professional organizations that defend the interests of teachers. Last but not least, the low self-esteem of teachers is also affected by publics belief that teaching is not professional or highly..