ABSTRACT
The major justifying rhetoric used by Western governments for increasing controls over what goes on in classrooms is that the decline in competitiveness of Western capitalist economies makes it imperative that schools be made to do their economic work of skills formation. In the most fundamental sense, the dominant paradigm of teacher evaluation is predicated on an indefensible dichotomy. There are a number of different ways of expressing this separation. Lundgren for example, speaks of a distinction between two educational contexts - those of ‘formulation’ and ‘realization’. Embedded within the dominant form of teacher evaluation is a particular view of what constitutes teaching. Those who endorse the dominant tradition of teacher evaluation assume that procedures originating in the physical sciences can be exported and applied to social contexts like teaching. Applying such procedures to social settings is to regard the inanimate as comparable with the animate.
