The argument of this article is that the time has come to re-assess the role that Philosophy has to play in the education of teachers, both at the beginning of and during their careers. Detailed references will be to the UK but the argument has much wider applicability within an international context in which the theoretical
components of teacher education programmes have come under increasing scrutiny, while at the same time the need for an increasingly highly qualified teaching force is widely recognised. Pressures to make teacher education courses more
vocationally relevant exist in many countries and it is too easily assumed that this means that their theoretical content has to be compromised. There is a frequent confusion between the claim that the learning teacher should be an apprentice (i.e. a junior employee) rather than a student and the claim that teaching does not require theoretical understanding