Teachers at the turn of the millenium: from excess in discourses to poverty in practices

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyze the "discourse reality" which characterizes many of the texts about education at the end of this century. The key to this paper is the excess-poverty logic as applied to the exam of the current situation of teachers: from the excess of political and mass media rhetoric to the poverty of educational policies; from the excess of the languages of international experts to the poverty of teacher education programs; from the excess of the scientific- educational discourse to the poverty of pedagogical practices, and from the excess of the "voices" of the teachers to the poverty of their associative practices. While not refusing a "utopian" thinking the author criticizes "prospective" analyses that reveal an "excess of future" which is at the same time a "deficit of present".