Society 4 min read By Callum Montgomery
UK and Australian public see teaching as closer to nursing and social work, US survey finds
A survey of more than 3,000 people in the US, England and Australia finds broad agreement that teaching is defined by care, but Americans are more likely to compare it to parenting and religious roles while Britons and Australians liken it to nursing and social work.
People in England and Australia are more likely to compare teaching to professional care roles such as nursing and social work, while Americans more often liken it to parenting or religious vocations, according to a survey of more than 3,000 respondents across the three countries.
The research, conducted between May 2025 and March 2026, asked an open-ended question: «Teaching is similar to what other occupation or activity?» Coaching emerged as the most common answer in all three countries, but the similarities diverged from there.
Coaching was named by 30 per cent of US respondents, compared with 23 per cent in both England and Australia. The differences became more pronounced when participants named other occupations and activities.
Respondents in England and Australia were more likely to associate teaching with institutional, credentialed and paid professional roles, such as nursing, lecturing and social work. One 39-year-old Australian man said: «Nursing. They care for and look after people whilst they are at their most vulnerable. Teachers do a similar thing by caring and teaching young people some of the skills they will need later in life.»
A 32-year-old man in England drew a parallel with lecturing, saying: «A lecturer, you are passing on knowledge to people, usually the younger generation.»
US respondents, by contrast, were more likely to describe teaching through caregiving roles such as parenting, and through religious figures such as priests, pastors or rabbis. A 33-year-old woman in the US said: «Being a parent, you are caring for young minds and shaping them through learning.» Another respondent, a 23-year-old woman, compared teaching to preaching: «As a preacher, he teaches the word of God. How they deliver the word determines how well the people will understand it.»
Despite these differences, the survey found a striking degree of agreement across the three countries. In all of them, respondents most often described teaching as centred on the relationship between teacher and student — a form of coaching, caregiving, parenting and other types of personal support. The researchers said the findings suggest that people in the three countries drew on somewhat different cultural repertoires when describing the profession, rather than reflecting a single universal view.
The results echo previous work showing that Republicans and Democrats in the US find common ground on what makes a good teacher, despite broader political polarisation over education. The researchers said they were surprised by how much agreement they found, given differences in schooling models and cultural norms.
Notably absent from the responses was artificial intelligence. Out of more than 3,000 answers, AI came up only a handful of times and never as the reason teaching and another occupation were said to be alike. This contrasts with its prominence in political and academic debates about the future of education. In September 2026, The New York Times conducted an informal survey of 37 education researchers who offered 30 ideas for fixing schools, focusing on interventions such as more per-pupil funding, banning cellphones and restricting AI in the classroom. Those ideas appeared far less often in the public explanations gathered in this survey.
The researchers argue that serious conversation about student achievement must include clear descriptions of very good teachers and the practices they use to encourage learning. Their findings, they say, show that teaching should make room for both the transmission of knowledge and the meaningful, caring relationships that make learning possible.
The study was carried out by academics at Arizona State University and California State University, East Bay, and published via The Conversation.
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