The current emphasis that organisations are placing upon knowledge and the corresponding attention that workplace epistemological values are receiving within the educational community has resulted in an interesting convergence of discourses—school-based and work-based. Even as workplaces are tending toward abstraction over practice—based knowing, schools are being nudged into doing the reverse. The result of this ferment is that traditional barriers between these kinds of knowledge are being removed. As can be seen from workplace examples, it is possible for liberal learning (...) to be in the service of instrumental ends. So too schools may come to see more clearly the value of situatedness and team-work in the transaction of liberal learning. More generally, we see also new possibilities for retreat from received views about the worth of practical knowledge. (shrink)

It is generally acknowledged that much contemporary education takes place within a dominant audit culture, in which accountability becomes a powerful driver of educational practices. In this culture, both pupils and teachers risk being configured as a means to an assessment and target-driven end: pupils are schooled within a particular paradigm of education. The article discusses some ethical issues raised by such schooling, particularly the tensions arising for teachers, and by implication, teacher educators who prepare and support teachers for work (...) in situations where vocational aims and beliefs may be in conflict with instrumental aims. The article offers De Certeau's concept of la perruque to suggest an opening to playful engagement for human ends in education, as a way of contending with and managing the tensions generated. I use the concept to recover an idea of solidarity for teacher educators and teachers to enable ethical teaching in difficult times. (shrink)