Teaching teachers Book

An excellent, short book, using analytical philosophy to explore problems in teacher education. He finds in the UK a loss of academic disciplines in education, namely psychology, philosophy, and history (noting that current education faculty would unlikely be hired at a university in the department of their "expertise"). Written in 1993, he also seems to have predicted the future when he points out the rise of relativism and social justice, all of which would corrupt our institutions, especially education, which would operate on fads and poorly constructed concepts such as "inclusion," "multiculturalism," and the like.

Near the end he suggests teacher education would be better served if separate facilities, namely faculties of education, were shut down, and "departments" of education created in the universities which are heavily governed by the university, and its professors are experts in disciplines relevant to education. Practice would thus be left only to the schools. This new TE model would require student-teachers to take courses from a department of education, learning about the disciplines and research informing the study of education, and intermittently, engage in practice "on the job" in the schools. The current mixing of "theory and practice" has resulted in the decline of academic respectability of educational fields, and their divorce is suggested.