| Abstract: | When hopelessness and helplessness become recurring themes in teacher education scholarship, this signals a conceptual problem with the question of autonomy in the profession. In this essay, Alice Pitt argues that breakdowns of professional life belong to what is most subjective in the profession. Pitt opens her analysis of this conundrum by examining some earlier formulations of the problem of learning a profession. Next, she explores four orientations to the role of education in modern life and examines an interview with a beginning teacher as a way to think about autonomy in its emotional as well as rational qualities. A reconfigured autonomy suggests that education is more than a site of the failure of the Enlightenment promise to advance reason's dominance in the organization of social life. Education, in its professional, practical, and experiential realms, reveals the dynamic qualities of the limits of reason, according to Pitt. She concludes that a constitutive alterity at the heart of the educational project renders the profession a significant site for ongoing investigation of the human condition and the play of autonomy. |
