Dumbing Down Teachers: Rethinking the Crisis of Public Education and the Demise of the Social State

In this paper, the author focuses specifically on how the current crisis regarding teacher layoffs in the United States is being analyzed and addressed through weak reformist discourses and how the hidden order of these discourses is revealed through current policies being implemented to reform existing programs and colleges of education charged with the significant task of preparing prospective teachers. His argument is organized around the assumption that at the heart of such reforms is an attempt to create colleges of education that will largely train teachers rather than give them a rigorous critical education. The dire effects of the reform measures will include turning colleges of education and alternative routes to certification into gatekeepers for a new kind of pedagogical culture and learning environment in which teachers are dumbed down. If left to proceed unchecked, reform will mean the advancement of a formative pedagogical culture that promotes political and cultural illiteracy while making teachers and students more receptive to the disempowering disciplinary practices of neoliberal policies, values, and social relations. (Contains 83 notes.)