The Place of Theory in the Professional Training of Teachers

In the literature on professionalization, it used to be assumed that one of the necessary criteria for an occupation to be categorized as a profession is that its practitioners should have a command of some form of esoteric knowledge. From time to time however, this assumption that a profession requires an esoteric cognitive base has been called into question from both ideological ends of the political spectrum. From the Left, the distrust of specialized knowledge has been rooted in its equalitarian ideology: arguably, no-one has any right to exclusive knowledge which gives access to either social or economic privilege; or, in an educational context, which has the effect of defining learners as essentially ignorant and utterly subservient to ‘authoritarian’ teachers. This assumption that a practitioner’s knowledge should be exoteric – available to anyone – is tantamount to the conclusion that anyone ought to be able to practise any occupation. Logically, it also seems to entail that anyone is competent to teach in schools.

From the neo-conservative Right, the objection to esoteric professional knowledge has been economically motivated. Such cognitive pretensions allegedly get in the way of the proper functioning of the market, especially the labour market, by setting an artificial obstacle to the movement of people between occupations in response to free market economic forces. Familiarly, it was one of Mrs. Thatcher’s ambitions to impose the same economic discipline upon the professions by attacking their restrictive practices that she had effectively succeeded in inflicting upon the trade unions. The claim that esoteric knowledge is a necessary requirement for practising a profession amounted to one such restrictive practice.