there are some lessons here for teacher education.

teacher education faces a cri sis in the 1990 under the impact of economic rationalist reform, such as those i nitiated in australia in higher education by the labor government and which have continued under the blitzkrieg polices of the coalition government. there are t hose like sharp (1990) who see little reason to defend academic faculties of edu cation, and then there are those whose technical interest in reorganising univer sity education, ensuring that they are confined to the lowest status amongst ter tiary studies. we believe that the resistance and counter hegemonic mode of the emancipatory perspective outlined in this chapter especially pertinent if teache r education is to make its mark as it serves both schools and society. the arguments canvassed in this chapter, and throughout this book, are not much in favour at the moment in teacher education, which is increasingly becoming mor e performance oriented., more instrumentalist in character. there is tendency to remove courses in philosophy, sociology and history (which we regard as central to teacher education) from undergraduate programs, in favour of concentrating o n teaching techniques and curriculum design. this has its place and value but no t if it is conducted in the absence of contextual studies. in praxis terms, the concentration on the action polarity of the dialectic is at the expense of the reflection polarity, at the expense of considering questions to do with power, discourse and culture. in practice, this is manifested in tea cher education courses which are, for the most part, crammed full of busy work p rojects, developing materials with no conscious attention to the theoretical con sideration underpinning them. in the long run, such approaches only lead to the proletarianisation of teacher's work, to its deskilling, to a reduction in its s tatus. without even discussing the methodological flaws in this tendency, which are leg ion and grounded in questionable epistemological assumptions, such educational r eductionism, popular though it might be with the technocrats, removes the consid eration of classroom issues from contextual base. to appeal to technocratic rhet oric, such approaches are shortsighted on the grounds of efficiency alone. as it is the contextual texture of schooling which interferes with efficient learning , a lack of appreciation of this texture will lead to greater school inefficienc y, not less. further, such approaches to teacher education lead to an intellectual deskilling of teaching profession which, on any grounds apart from that of political neute ring (which some of course favour), cannot be justified in terms of what is requ ired of teachers in the late twentieth century and beyond into the emancipatory agenda of this book, then teachers need an intellectual education of the broades t sort, embracing sociology, ethics, philosophy and history, which places them i n contact with the social arigins of education, with the range of ideologies and discourses that have governed and are governing, and will likely govern, wester n society and its institutions like education. teaching and the values of educat ion to which it is finally accountable, in other words, requires a synthesis bet ween action and reflection; as a profession, teaching is praxis incarnate.