Abstract:

Bagley’s essentialism, as one of the four schools of educational philosophy, has long been well known by international educators. However, this label of “the founder of essentialism” also greatly diluted and even obscured his theoretical contribution to improving American teacher education before he worked for the Normal College of Columbia University under the background of the transformation and upgrading from “normal school” to “teacher college” (normal college) in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, he established a set of knowledge system about teacher education with the goal of cultivating “teacher scholar” in the process of controversy about “academic”, “professional” or “social” teacher training, which laid the theoretical foundation and career blueprint for the subsequent development of international teacher education. Although China has gradually completed the upgrading and transformation of normal universities around the end of the 20th century, the dilemma of “specialty” or “discipline” of teacher training has been bothering the development of teacher education in China. In recent years, in the process of teacher education and teacher training in normal universities, there has even been a significant tendency of “de-professionalization” of “defining specialty by discipline” or “replacing teacher specialty by discipline”. It not only greatly “narrows” and “misleads” the majority of teachers’ professional understanding of their own work, Moreover, in practice, it further “solidifies” and “intensifies” the image of the majority of teachers as “teachers”. Reviewing Bagley’s philosophy of teacher education will not only help to clarify many puzzles and misunderstandings about teachers’ professional attributes, but also provide important theoretical enlightenment for improving China’s teacher education program and reshaping the professional connotation and professional image of teachers’ work.

Key words: William C. Bagley, teacher education, professionalization of subject-matter, teacher-scholar, emergent evolution.