Toward an Anti-Capitalist Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper outlines the culpability of teacher education in perpetuating the neoliberal turn in education and addresses what must be done to reverse course and carve out a teacher education that is wholly committed to combating the disastrous effects of capitalist exploitation on both teachers and students. After an examination of neoliberal educational policy at both the national and global level, the author moves to teacher education to identify elements of teacher education that are currently supporting the neoliberal educational agenda. Finally, the author identifies a new vision and aim for teacher education that places a critique of capitalism at the center of teacher training as we work collectively to combat oppression, in all of its forms, and to ground the work of all teachers in an anti-oppressive (Kumashiro, 2009) pedagogy that includes anti-capitalism as a fundamental aim for all teachers and classrooms.