Payback time? Discourses of lack, debt and the moral regulation of teacher education

This paper analyses recent policy and discourse in the UK lifelong learning sector toidentify a tension in discourse which positions teacher educators as essential to theknowledge economy while simultaneously insisting on the deficits they represent.Drawing on critical analyses from Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurizio Lazzarato and GillesDeleuze, I challenge altruistic views of professional motivation and situate individual pro-fessionalism under a construction of an indebted subject. Examining recent attempts toredefine professional standards in the sector, I argue that teachers are positioned as subject to homogenisation and ethically indebted to a higher ideal. Ethical commitments to adult learning, I suggest, are a cost-effective instrument of social control because of their imbrication in this discourse of irredeemable moral debt to the sector. Responses to thissituation, I argue, are likely to include forms of professional mobility which undermine it.