Introduction: Current Problematics in Teacher Professional Learning

Almost a century after the publication of Democracy and Education, we find ourselves in uncertain and ambiguous times. Despite the efforts and indeed triumphs of individual teachers and schools, on a policy level we appear to be once again retreating from a once-within-our-grasp vision of progressive education into safer, more measurable and quantifiable territory. More worryingly, we see the very notion of democracy at the heart of Dewey's thinking under threat, not only at the hands of terrorists mounting militant attacks on ‘the west’, but perhaps more disturbingly at the hands of religious, economic and educational fundamentalists and a pervasive neoliberal educational agenda. The appearance of Democracy and Education at number four on the Human Events list of the ten most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (outranked only by Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, Hitler's Mein Kampf and Mao's Little Red Book) serves to demonstrate the threat that progressive ideas about education and its role in the creation of civil society pose to conservative pundits and the post-9/11 social order. Security - in relation to national borders, energy, food, resources and other dimensions - is the primary concern within the new world order, but what of our educational security, and who and where are its warriors?