A Rhetoric of Certainty: Modern Knowledge Practices in Contemporary Education

The past decade has seen increasingly tightly specified graduate outcomes for undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education courses across much of the developed world. These outcomes potentially have the power to describe what ought to be seen as the proper sphere of school education. In this chapter, the author draws upon education policy documents, state education regulations, and parliamentary reports to write about common sense accounts of the goals and purposes of compulsory state schooling and the regulation of pre-service teacher education in universities. The author considers the implications of these accounts for teacher professionalism and argues for a more visible assertion of the complexity of education. Finally, the author considers the implications of this recommendation for pre-service teacher education in universities.