ABSTRACT
In education, as in politics, the terms ‘ideology’ and ‘ideological’ are now more often than not used as pejoratives: to label an action ideological is to condemn it as probably biased and doctrinaire. This is unfortunate. If human thought and action are regulated by our developing values and beliefs, to condemn that form of selfregulation we call the ideological out of hand is to cut us off from the origins of our own behaviour. It may be that professional teachers, like doctors, politicians, priests and social workers, need easily accessed belief systems to guide them through the difficult social encounters which compose their jobs.
