Talk about education inevitably incites disagreement and debate. But there is one statement I make which consistently generates approval and consensus: "I never really know something until I have taught it to others". Perhaps this simple observation - that teaching enables not just learning but, also, knowing - can serve as the starting point for a revolution in education and, even, in public life.

Most immediately, it involves radically redefining undergraduate education not as another level of learning but as preparation for teaching - that is, all students, not only those reading for degrees and certificates in education, should be conceived of as future teachers and their undergraduate studies should cultivate it. Even more grandly, it means creating a nation of teachers.

Education in the United States has been under siege for most of my adult life. Seeking a scapegoat for everything from economic crisis and decline to the enervation and degeneration of public life and culture, every level and aspect of schooling has come under assault. As a 1983 department of education report put it, America is perceived to be A Nation at Risk. Not surprisingly, in view of the fundamental role that teachers play in education, the university schools of education that prepare them have been the prime targets of attack, alongside their trade unions.

Grounded in their respective understandings of the contemporary US crisis and the purpose and promise of education, critics from right to left have proposed intriguing projects to reform the present system of teacher training. Convinced that liberals - no, make that radicals - with the massive organisational support of the National Education Association (the biggest union) have controlled USschools of education for at least a generation, conservatives such as Rita Kramer in Ed School Follies (1991) and Chester Finn in We Must Take Charge (1991) have lambasted "ed schools" for their supposedly vapid, if not silly, curricula and for promoting social causes more than intellectual excellence. They have gone on to offer a variety of alternative schemes for preparing teachers.

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Defending the idea of teachers as "transmitters" of skills and the nation's cultural heritage, conservative plans for teacher training usually involve reducing the number of courses required in education and pedagogy in favour of requiring additional preparation in, respectively, the core disciplines for prospective primary teachers and a particular discipline for prospective high school teachers. Thereafter, prospective teachers would serve a period in classroom apprenticeships under the guidance and assessment of officially-recognised "master teachers". In fact, there are some conservatives who would completely eliminate education and pedagogy requirements, thereby abolishing "ed schools" and leaving questions of educational research and design to the social sciences.

Education critics from the left essentially agree with the conservatives about the staleness and foolishness of ed-school curricula, but they see the problems of education and teacher preparation differently. Contending that the nation's schools function merely to reproduce the inequalities and oppressions of industrial-capitalist society, critical theorists, most notably, Henry Giroux in Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (1988) and Joe Kincheloe in Toward a Critical Politics of Teacher Thinking (1993), have called for the liberation and reconstruction of education, beginning with the reconception of teachers as "transformative intellectuals" rather than merely as "transmitters" of knowledge and skills. Thus, in their view, ed-school curricula need to be drastically revised to incorporate and emphasise historical, political and multi-cultural studies - thereby "empowering" teachers to serve as democratic social-change agents capable of developing students as "critical citizens".

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Unfortunately, as original, critical and welcome as are many of these proposals, they are all limited in their vision and imagination. They fail to recognise the radical promise and possibility at the heart of teacher education and how they might be redeemed and realised on a grander scale. Rather than merely reform or even abolish teacher education, I would argue that it is time to convert all university and further education into the preparation of teachers. Conservatives are right to stress the transmission of knowledge and skills because modern industry and a democratic polity demand a highly-skilled and knowledgeable citizenry, and teacher education programmes have definitely slighted the primary acquisition of "knowledge" in favour of "method". Not only do standards need to be raised, but further and better preparation in the academic disciplines is imperative.

At the same time, the left is also correct. Teachers are inherently "intellectuals" and, if we really are to begin to address the economic, political and cultural crises we face in the United States, teachers must be prepared to develop knowledgeable and critical citizens and workers. At the least, therefore, teacher education must be reformed to accomplish it. The goal was stated well by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci: "Democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every 'citizen' can 'govern' and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this." Hopefully, both left and right would subscribe to such a vision.

Yet, why should the transmission of knowledge and the making of critical citizens be seen as limited to the formal education of the young? In a modern democracy, should not they be central and ongoing experiences of people throughout the course of their lives? And, continuing in this vein, why should the capacities, sensibilities and skills essential to those endeavours be limited to schoolteachers? Should they not be developed in everyone? In other words, if we are seeking to advance both economic development and democratic development, the debate about teacher training must include higher and further education generally.

I am not recommending that we merely extend ed-school instruction to all liberal and technical arts programmes, because, again, ed-school curricula and practices need to be seriously revamped (though abolition would be foolish for surely we will continue to want teachers specially attuned to the particular needs and requirements of children and young people) and, furthermore, different circumstances require different pedagogies. What I am calling for, however, is consideration of both the way we train teachers for primary and secondary schools and the way we educate all our students for public life.

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In other words, we should begin to ask how we might better prepare them to work as "citizen-pedagogues" in the diverse public arenas in which they will be engaged. Clearly, not everyone should be a classroom instructor, but everyone should be capable of practising the arts of teaching.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg professor of social change at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.