Deskilling of the Teaching Profession

Deskilling of the teaching profession has been a recurring, contentious issue, especially since the 1970s, most prominently debated in the Anglo-American world. The issue has been primarily discussed from two perspectives: deskilling because of bureaucratic control in general, and the debilitating effect on the teaching profession because of the merging interests of an enhanced centralizing tendency of the state and private commercial interests. The first perspective was debated through the 1970s and until the mid-1980s. The next phase of the deskilling debate emerged out of the discernible tendencies of bureaucratic-managerial control on teaching since the early 1990s, and has seen a revival in the new millennium because of the global spread of the neoliberal agenda in education. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests a definition of ...