Introduction

Teacher-professionalism in the Western world reached its heights around the mid-1980s. Since then there have been varied but interconnected moves to change the role and nature of teaching. Schools are powerful agents in the process of consciousness formation and establishing hegemony, and in the present circumstances they are caught up actively the 'grand narrative' of the market. Teachers educated in a particular way could be well qualified and well placed to help future generations construct a future worth looking towards. This book argues that teachers can be sufficiently well placed to operate counter-hegemonically; and that in the contemporary context they should take an informed counter-hegemonic political-epistemological stance from which to control the educational purposes of their schools, and to direct those purposes towards the end of rational social reconstruction. It presents a case for teachers to be counted among the intellectual vanguard in social reconstruction.