The Professionalization of Tomorrow's Teachers: an analysis of US teacher education reform rhetoric

Teaching cannot 'professionalize itself as medicine has done, and reform proposals that urge it to do so ignore issues of teaching's place in the occupational hierarchy. Applying methods of discourse analysis, the present paper demonstrates how the discourse of US education reform proposals, exemplified by the Holmes Group report, Tomorrow's Teachers (1986), constructs knowledge about professionalization of teaching. This analysis bears not only on what the report says but how it says it, thus differing from the numerous studies and critical reviews of the report in focusing on the report's form, and not only its content. The rhetoric of Tomorrow's Teachers reveals its close family resemblance to the long tradition of the 'American jeremiad' (Bercovitch, 1978), the typically American genre of self‐criticism (and self‐reassurance) that dates back to the political sermons of the New England Puritan preachers. The underlying medical metaphor of Tomorrow's Teachers (teaching is doctoring') is shown to operate in a mystified and unself‐critical way in the report's discourse. Assimilating teacher education to medical education makes available in the educational context a whole range of concepts from the medical profession whose relevance to the situation of teaching is at best problematic. The rhetoric of US reform proposals is shown to endorse an ideology of professionalization which serves to mask the ongoing 'proletarianization' of teaching.