ABSTRACT
Current efforts to reform teacher education raise issues of teacher autonomy. These analyses ignore the historical conditions in which teachers’ work has been formed. Since the early 1800s, the work conditions of teachers have been continually defined by the pressures of urban growth, class structures, gender relations, ideologies of professionalism and models of social science. These dynamics of the relation of society to schooling served to narrow the autonomy of teaching. The chapter concludes that an adequate perspective to contemporary issues of teaching and teacher education requires that we have historical understanding of occupational development that includes attention to issues of social policy and power.
