Respondents in three countries see teaching as a caring relationship, a survey finds

The "caring relationship" finding depends on a grouping the authors made. Coaching was the most common answer in every country ^[3], and the researchers count it, along with caregiving, parenting and other personal support, as teaching centered in the relationship between teacher and student ^[8]. That is a plausible reading of free-text answers. The write-up does not describe the coding scheme, so a reader cannot see how much of the "caring" category is coaching alone.

The only country-level figures are for coaching, where the US sits 7 percentage points above England and Australia ^[18]. For everything else the authors report direction. Respondents in England and Australia were more likely to name institutional, credentialed and paid professional roles such as nursing, lecturing and social work ^[5]. US respondents were more likely to name parenting and religious figures such as priests, pastors or rabbis ^[6]. The write-up does not give per-country sample sizes or say how people were recruited, so we cannot tell whether those gaps are large or inside sampling noise.

The quotations the authors chose show two different routes to the same theme. "Nursing. They care for and look after people while 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 39-year-old Australian man told the researchers ^[9]. A 23-year-old US woman picked a preacher: "As a preacher, he teaches the word of God. How they deliver the word determines how well the people will understand it," she said ^[10]. The first answer is about looking after vulnerable people. The second is about getting content across.

The authors are cautious about the cross-country contrast. They wrote that international comparisons "do not represent a single view of teaching" and that respondents "likely drew on somewhat different cultural repertoires" ^[11]. They also wrote: "We were surprised by how much agreement we found." ^[12]

The authors set their results beside a New York Times informal survey of 37 education researchers, run in September 2026, that produced 30 ideas for fixing schools ^[14]. The list was mostly interventions such as more per-pupil funding, banning cellphones and restricting AI in the classroom ^[15]. The authors say those ideas appeared far less often in their participants' answers ^[16].

The comparison has limits. The authors' fieldwork ended in March 2026, six months before the Times poll ^[19]. Their prompt asked what teaching resembles ^[2]; it did not ask what should change in schools. The thing this doesn't tell you is whether people who never mentioned AI would support limits on it.