Teacher-education-desiring-machines

This article will argue that the notion of a teacher and the coexisting teacher education processes are being progressively emptied out, and replaced by the model of a corporate worker, serving the needs of a post-industrial financial capitalist society. This society requires flows of money, as lines of differentiated credit and debt repayments, and the concurrent consumer desires that keep these flows of money going: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (Wright, 2004, p. 124). Teachers have had their identities stripped of their previous roles as guardians and proponents of civil society, or as the keepers of an essential knowledge to live a good life. Instead their roles have become merged with the over-riding concerns of financial capitalism, which primarily works from the perspective of the profit motive, and that reduces all activity under its aegis to calculable economic values representable as numerical, parallel to the multitude of companies on the stock exchange. Quality teacher rhetoric from governments is linked to human capital arguments and education entails the production of workers for increasingly volatile markets.1 This article argues that to get to the bottom of the ongoing, global, reciprocating and ubiquitous processes of financialisation, in and through teacher education, we might consider teacher education as an abstract machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), that, is as a future-focused, non-representational field of possibility. From this perspective, it does not represent or become fixed upon the real in the present but “rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (1988, p. 142). The points of subjectification of teacher education, those who are ‘becoming teachers’ and imagining future careers for themselves as teachers within the education machine, are at its heart, yet they are also surrounded by, and part of, the machinery of financial capitalism, including how governmental institutions have become embroiled under its remit. Of course, one can imagine the situation as otherwise, and the illusionary, idealistic, other-worldly, sometimes regressive projections of financial capitalism are important parts of its functioning, which should not be overlooked in the analysis, and are an aspect of the problematic that is being addressed here.