ABSTRACT
Few things betray the assumptions of their own time and place more clearly than predictions about the future; equally, few things inform planning for the future more than assumptions about the past. Debate about teacher education has, perhaps particularly, been bedevilled by the interposition into policy debates of questionable assumptions about the past and wild speculation about the future. Assumptions about the past come in a number of clearly defined categories: the myth of decline and the myth of progress are particularly potent. On some accounts, the present is a pale reflection of the past, since when standards have fallen, expectations declined and teachers become less professional, less effective and less marked out as scholarly experts than ever their pre-Plowden, pre-war or Victorian predecessors were. On other accounts, the educational present is the consequence of marked progress since the past: teachers are better trained in a more rigorously professional environment, schools provide more effective tailoring to the needs of individual pupils and there is a professional consensus about effective practice which ensures that quality is now maintained in a way which it never was. Many of the current debates about teacher education turn on the ways in which proponents of different arguments reflect these assumptions about the past: policy must either build on effective recent practice or address historical failures.
