Shoring up the pillars of modernity: Teacher education and the quest for certainty

Teacher education is set within countervailing influences. On the one hand, governments seek to minimise their expenditure on the welfare state as they make their national economies competitive within global markets. This is associated with a centralising tendency which is typified by an increasing standardisation of the means and ends of education, including teacher education, especially in England. On the other hand, consumer culture, social fragmentation and intellectual ferment all combine to exert centripetal influences on teacher education. In England, the government's reaffirmation of a highly bureaucratic modernist structure for teacher education can itself be questioned on economic grounds. The emerging knowledge-based, high-value 'new' economy is ill-served by thinly-disguised Taylorist management regimes which impose conformity and engender low levels of trust. Nor will a back-to-basics pedagogy resonate with young people whose affinity for a conformist Protestant ethic may be wearing increasingly thin. The argument is theorized using Toulmin's concept of modernity.