ABSTRACT
For two centuries in the United States—from the time of the nation’s founding in the late eighteenth century to the present day—four generations of teacher education reformers have struggled to elevate the image of teachers. They have crafted a rhetoric that they hoped would legitimize a profession, generate intellectually sound teacher education programmes, and secure the status of the teachers. They have tried to create definitions of expert knowledge and construct intellectually defensible paradigms of teacher preparation. They have promoted programmes of political and social reform designed to organize sufficient cultural, social, and professional authority to try to mediate the conflicting pressures of local, state, and national authorities and interest groups (Borrowman, 1956, 1965; Elsbree, 1939; Goodlad et al., 1990; Herbst, 1989a, 1989b; Johnson, 1989;).
