The Sera Lecture 2004 Education Reform as Social Barberism: Economism and the End of Authenticity

within which the construct is embedded. I will ‘own up’ straight away to trading on and perpetuating parts of the ‘folk epistemology of professionalism’ (Pels, 1999: 102) and I want to have my conceptual cake and eat it. I shall try to treat professionalism as ‘what it is’, a form of situated practice, and make some claims for a normative version of a sort professionalism which is neither ‘folk’ nor ‘post’. I also want to take professionalism as emblematic of something else, of certain general changes in the nature of, or possibilities of our lives within high modernism. I also want to acknowledge that I write here from personal experience, from within rather than simply about the practices of professionalism. This is one more contribution to the cacophony of voices which speak to, for and about teachers which are competing to be heard with more or less success. I want to argue here that professionalism is coming to its end, is being dislodged from its ‘precarious, glittering existence’ – that there is a profound shift underway in several of the ‘many independent forces which condition the formation of teachers’ professional identities in practice’ (Dillabough 1999: 390). A shift so profound that within the ‘post-welfare’ regime of social service, professionalism as an ethicalcultural practice, appears to have no place, no future. Mine then is a narrative of despair, of loss and pain and betrayal, though it should not necessarily be read as a story of tarnished glory – more like a fairy story about the struggle between the lesser of two, or more, evils. I take it that professionalism, as a pre-reform or un-reformed category, rests, in part at least — because it also has important structural and organisational features — on a particular relationship between the practitioner and their work, a relationship of commitment that is located within communal and internal dialogues. That is,