Challenging the Status Quo of Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

often defining and shaping educational, political, economic, and social beliefs. In the same vein, myths play an important role in public education. It has only been over the past few decades, for example, that schooling has fallen victim to the myth of neutrality, which considers the teaching process to be a neutral, apolitical, and amoral endeavor. Influenced by a discourse centered on technocratic rationality, efficiency, and standardization of curriculum, the myth of neutrality emphasizes the technical aspects of teaching that result in presenting knowledge as a realm of objective facts. For example, textbooks and worksheets become the source of this objective knowledge. They are accepted without question by teachers, and beyond this, revered as the sole ways and means of constructing knowledge. The result is the reduction of "moral, aesthetic, educational and political issues to technical problems; why and what are reduced to how" (Bullough and Goldstein 1984, 44). In turn, teachers fail to address controversial issues and moral dilemmas. Instead, emphasis is placed on the pragmatics of how to and what works. This practice has reduced teachers to technicians who are more concerned with the mastering and refining of teaching methodologies than with "transforming many of the basic cultural institutions and belief systems" (Purpel 1989, 3).