Marianne Larsen's book situates Victorian ideals of teaching in the context of present-day constructions of “good” and “bad” teachers. Tracking the subordination of teachers to education administrators and policy makers, this illuminating book offers insight into the negative representations of contemporary teachers, the rise of the accountability- assessment complex, and the devaluation of teaching and learning. It can help both specialists and others understand the origins of the draconian features of education today, such as high-stakes testing.

Much of the book focuses on the disciplinary functions of schooling, which applied as much or more to teachers as to students. Certainly the most progressive nineteenth-century educationists theorized what we might call a learner-centered practice, at least in the case of early learning. Nonetheless, student-centered approaches did not extend to those who were learning to be teachers. The growing discipline of teacher education rationalized technique with future teachers at odds with its approach to other students. Otherwise progressive policy makers and education administrators typically justified their instrumentalist approach to teachers on the basis of the centrality of teaching to the mission of schooling. Ironically, the centrality of the teacher's role was not often supported materially in the form of adequate training and salaries. In chapter 4, “Discourses of Crisis and Derision: Targeting the Poor and the Teacher,” Larsen describes a labor system for elementary schoolteachers where poverty and control were strategically intertwined.

Poorly paid, ill trained, and working in a system that hired the least qualified persons for available jobs, Victorian teachers were set up to fail en masse, then criticized for their failure to practice modern teaching methods. Blunt descriptions of a teaching force characterized by “incompetence, laziness, . . . lack of spirit” (66) and reliance on corporal punishment were useful to education administrators, reformers, and policy makers, providing a rationale for intensifying control over pedagogy and curriculum. Compared to the modest sums devoted to teacher pay, what strikes the reader is the contrastingly enormous resources invested in the study, inspection, reporting, hiring, and assessment of these teachers. Larsen's book chronicles the rise of a comfortable, comparatively well-paid education-administration class that performed this oversight.

The broken teacher was frequently represented as possessing a “broken down” (63) teacher's body (likely drawing on the reality of an often injured, disabled, and aging labor pool). The trope of the aging, failed, or broken body generally carried the meaning of a female teacher's or a group of teachers' inability to meet the central gendered expectation of maternal care. By contrast, the schoolmaster performed masculinity by appearing up to date in his subject knowledge and methods. In this formulation the schoolmistresses' character and what we would call personality were central to her teaching role, whereas for the schoolmaster the scientific process and knowledge were all important to his.

How much have we inherited these gendered stereotypes in contemporary constructions of good and moral teachers? Today the rationalist scientific discourse has won out over the affect discourse. The rationalist ideal is still gendered masculine, and it is applied to an ever-more-feminized elementary teaching workforce. A crucial finding of Larsen's research is that the deficit model—the near-universal assumption that teachers were lacking—was the basis for gendered teacher vocationalism. According to the professional discourse, a teacher's vocation was activated in the course of her training, formal and informal. This contradicts usual notions of vocation preceding the choice of a profession.

Toward the end of chapter 6, “Schools as Sites of Disciplinary Control,” Larsen presents a section on “The playground: A site of introspection” that is jarringly different than the rest of the chapter. The discrepancy is not a fault of the book. Rather it reveals fissures in theory and practice that survive today. This section documents a competing discourse about play, self-knowledge, and character on the playground that is appealing and familiar to anyone sympathetic to child-centered or collaborative methods of early education. Larsen narrates the playground as a place supporting theory and practice very different from the broader regime of schooling, offering opportunities for privacy and collaboration and relief from militarization and regulation of time.

This segment helps Larsen place the social-control mainstream of Victorian teacher training (that resonates so clearly with recent British and North American education “reform”) alongside concurrent but more optimistic, learner-centered, localized, and teacher-validating traditions. Little attention has been paid in today's mainstream media to the large and organized parent-teacher resistance to the intensification of education for social control. With this segment, Larsen helps us to see that these resisters are also working toward a Victorian vision, the alternative Victorian vision of education emphasizing play, collaboration, growth, and the dignity of both teacher and pupil.