ABSTRACT
The ascendancy of technicism, of technical or instrumental rationality, is sufficiently marked in education, in the English-speaking world at least, to need little illustration. The assumption that the main values of the education system can be characterised in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, and that learning to teach is a matter of acquiring competencies. The need for an account of the ‘rationality of practice’ of teaching which supplies an alternative to prevailing technicist versions grows ever more pressing. In the recent UK Green Paper, Teachers Meeting the Challenge of Change (1998), technicism begins to parody itself, in general adulation of all things technical and technological. Practical judgement has, unlike technical rationality, a significant and irreducibly ethical dimension. The other aspect of the ethical nature of practical judgement can be seen by again examining the distinction commonly made between practical judgement and technical reason.
