ABSTRACT
The role of teacher education for citizenship education was first addressed publicly in Australia at a conference on political education initiatives in teacher education in October 1989. Planning appropriate teacher education studies to reflect the second issue, and developing strategies for addressing the third, are the responsibilities of individual institutions and their education faculties. Evidence of disinterest in political matters is provided in Education for Active Citizenship. However, it relates only to low student interest in the dominant institutional and adult party-political conceptions of politics at the local, state, and national levels. Developing new curriculum materials for political education or new ways of planning and teaching particular subjects in existing programmes, without an engagement in the critique of ideology, only contributes to the maintenance of the reproductive functions of teacher education.
