Teacher in 859: Fatima al-Fihri founds al-Qarawiyyin

The world's largest profession: from Sumerian tablet houses to AI-era classrooms, one adult tasked with turning thirty strangers into a room that learns. Teaching is one of the oldest documented professions on earth. Sumerian "tablet houses" were drilling boys in cuneiform by the mid-third millennium BCE, and among the surviving exercise tablets is a schoolboy's essay, known to scholars as "Schooldays," complaining about being caned by his teacher — proof that the classroom, the curriculum and the difficult pupil are all older than the alphabet. Confucius, Socrates and the madrasa masters of the medieval Islamic world each built traditions that still shape how the job is done.

It is also the largest profession in the world: UNESCO counts roughly 94 million teachers across all levels of schooling, and estimates that 44 million more will be needed by 2030 just to reach universal basic education. The route in varies — Finland demands a research master's degree, England a degree plus Qualified Teacher Status, Korea a brutally competitive state employment exam — but nearly everywhere the pattern is the same: a degree, supervised classroom practice, and a state license.

This page follows the job from the scribal schools of Sumer through Comenius's first picture textbook, the Prussian compulsory-schooling decree and the normal schools that made teaching a trained profession, to Montessori, Freire and today's AI tutoring tools. It covers how people actually become teachers in different countries, what the craft consists of hour by hour, who reached the top of the profession and how, what teachers earn from Luxembourg to India, and how much of the work automation can realistically absorb.