Abstract
The supply of teachers is chronically out of phase with demand. The nation's colleges of teacher education were over supplying the market by a wide margin as recently as 1972, when an estimated 253,201 new teachers sought 142,180 jobs. Furthermore, the teachers’ colleges were still increasing production in those areas which had for several years been oversupplied (for example, social studies). This problem represents an enormous waste of national educational resources and one of the nation's poorest examples of educational planning. Suggested new policies include redirection of colleges of teacher education away from production of school teachers and administrators and toward educational specialists for government, industrial, health care, and welfare institutions. Such direction calls for a reconceptualization of the curriculum for preparing educators.
Suggested is a new curricular sequence for teacher education which begins with general training in the teaching-learning process including such areas as program planning, evaluation, instructional theory, and ends with specialization in institutional application, i.e., training that emphasizes the peculiar needs of prisons, hospitals, business and industry, government, churches, community development, and schools including special fields of school teaching — early childhood, elementary, and secondary.
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