Political aspects in teacher training today: a critique from Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The present study analyzes political aspects, purposes and objectives of teacher training in the Distance Education model. Currently, teacher training using this model has become hegemonic, as seen by the growing number of supply and demand for these courses. However, would teacher training be adequate in this format? Thinkers about education insist that teacher training cannot be reduced to professionalization along the lines of business values. Fast, effective and efficient training does not seem to fit the very conception of teacher training. In this sense, the text intends to draw attention to a process of even “dehumanization”, regarding teacher training, which, for this purpose, takes up some points about Hannah Arendt’s thinking in an attempt to analyze whether this training could “go well” when it is reduced only to this type of technology. We also use the most recent studies on the subject, such as those by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons – both researchers take up Arendt and discuss education as a public good. In this way, the tendency of a “personalized” training, focused on the individual, seems to be lost in relation to the idea of “common”, “public good”.