Rethinking Teacher Education: Why We Need Different Training for Different School Systems
Keywords:
teacher education, employability, labour market stratification, Pakistan, graduate employability, private schoolsAbstract
The lack of alignment between teacher education and the requirements of the labour market has been documented, however, dominant explanations are still caught within a flat ontology that defines the problem in terms of a lack of skills. Instead, this article critiques this narrative by analysing the Pakistan teacher education system as a critical realist perspective, based on empirical data from a qualitative study of the stratified private school market in Quetta. According to the analysis, the employability problem is neither a calibration mistake nor a purely structural issue; it is a structural impossibility because a monolithic and standardised curriculum trying to meet three fundamentally incompatible labour market segments. Technologically literate, performative – these are the schools that are looking for elite teachers; resilient, resourceful – the other schools; and embedded, with linguistic and cultural capital – the low-fee schools. These profiles are distinct from each other and no one graduate profile is unfit for employment in two or three of these market segments. The authors contend that the “national uniformity” of teacher education is an apparatus of epistemic injustice, which is designed to consistently create graduates who are theoretically knowledgeable but not practically prepared. The consequences are more than just for Pakistan; they are for any system of centralised education that finds itself in the face of highly polarised labour markets, where the generic graduate is an unlikely policy target.
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