ON AN August day in 1885, artist Robert Harris of Prince Edward Island paid a call on Kate Henderson, the teacher at the local one-room school. According to an account by Harris, Henderson told him about her meeting with the local school trustees, who had challenged her unconventional ways of teaching. Her vivid description of the scene suggested a painting to Harris, who set about creating one of the most evocative depictions of the life of a rural Canadian teacher. In Harris' painting, a beautiful, poised, and very young woman is on her feet bravely facing the four dour men who are her accusers. In its description of the painting, the National Gallery of Canada website explains that the young schoolteacher is defending educational reform. She stands before the cold-hearted trustees, who are doing their best to quell her progressive spirit. They are comfortably seated, visibly older, of another mind and another era. In sympathy with the woman's cause, Harris has carved his name into the wooden desk just below our heroine's right hand.1 In a dramatization of the painting for television's Heritage Moment, a heated exchange takes place between Miss Henderson and Trustee Clarence over who controls how reading will be taught in the school. The exchange ends with Trustee Clarence capitulating after having to admit that he cannae read a word.2 In the 1880s teachers were vulnerable to the vagaries of community worthies who had absolute power to determine whether teachers were paid and how much, whether they would be retained or dismissed, what they would teach, and how they would behave in their spare time. Typically, even one-room schools were governed by their own boards. Most viewed chairing the board of trustees as a community obligation, but for a few it presented a business opportunity, as the school's teacher was generally obliged to board at the home of the chairman, who pocketed a sizable portion of her salary in exchange. This vulnerability to exploitation and abuse drew teachers together. Fledgling teacher organizations bound their members to a promise to refuse to work for less than a certain annual salary or to take eggs or vegetables in lieu of salary. Over time, these organizations evolved according to a sort of institutional Maslow's Hierarchy. While never abandoning a vigilant defense of job security and benefits, they increasingly defended teachers' rights to responsible autonomy. Gradually, the Trustee Clarences of this world relinquished their oversight of individual teachers to professional managers (principals, inspectors, and so forth) thought to be more fit to evaluate teachers' skills and personal conduct. Not every young teacher agreed.The men they had to please may no longer have been trustees of limited education, but teachers were still isolated and still vulnerable to arbitrary and sometimes unprincipled conditions if they wished to keep their jobs. Quite recently, I came across correspondence between my mother, who was a rural teacher in the 1930s, and the school inspector who evaluated her. He had demanded a loan of several hundred dollars from her, a request she could hardly refuse. The money was never repaid. Over time, teachers began to assert their own claims to professionalism. They demanded not only protection from arbitrary dismissal and other employee rights, but also the right to exercise greater responsibility for the competency of the profession as a whole. Teachers' codes of ethics, crafted primarily by teachers themselves, were written into provincial legislation, along with the profession's powers to sanction its own members. Through their organizations, teachers devised structures to investigate, hear, and rule on allegations of unethical conduct. Parallel powers regarding competence were also granted, but these were very rarely exercised. Informally, teacher organizations might be facilitating the departure of incompetent teachers from the profession, but to critics, it seemed that teachers defended their own, even if it meant that poor teachers survived to teach another day. …