Teacher Education’s Purpose and the Plurality of Dysconsciousness

Education, with teacher education as sub-specialization, has historically struggled for political recognition as a university discipline, given its strong professional and practice orientation, and its plurality of theory and research method. This Achilles’ heel has particular implications for how teacher education plays out in previously fragmented, hierarchized and colonized societies. As such, in the quest for uniformity (and equity) across all spheres of society, it falls foul to a somewhat violent universality that unwittingly renders the previously disenfranchised even more so. In the South African context, teacher education contoured by the prescripts of national policy, such as Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education (MRTEQ), struggles to effectively respond to the multiple exigencies that present in the Anthropocene. This chapter invokes ‘dysconsciousness’ to address the question of the multiple manifestations of the lack of consciousness in the teacher education project in South Africa. It argues that the titular question of the book, namely, ‘What is education for?’, has changed over time, from having a distinct hierarchical segregationist intention under apartheid, to a national socio-economic rescue agenda. Of significance is that the question of what teacher education is for remains firmly ensnared in western humanism. The chapter concludes with provocations for a posthumanist orientation, one that challenges the notion of remaining at the level of the epistemological.