ABSTRACT
The rise of disorganized capitalism outlined in Chapter 1 has brought uncertain and changing times for teachers. They are being required to make schooling more responsive to new technologies and work processes, to restore national culture and traditional values against the threats of globalization and moral relativism, and to do more with reduced resources as the state seeks to reduce its spending on education in real terms. The introduction of a national curriculum and assessment, local management of schools, regular inspections and new forms of teacher education mean that teachers’ work is being reorganized and redefined. There are ongoing debates about whether such changes amount to a new professionalism or to deskilling and proletarianization and about whether the restructuring of state schooling provides space for the kinds of education for sustainability (EFS) explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Top-down, bureaucratic reform threatens to reinforce the irrelevance of schools as ‘modern institutions in a postmodern world’, but there are opportunities to exploit the paradoxes of postmodernity and to develop new kinds of schools, teaching and teachers (Hargreaves, 1994).
