AbstractResearch into the concerns of teachers during their training and throughout the early years of professional life (Fuller, 1969; McCahon and Carpenter, 1987) identifies discipline and classroom control as issues of major importance for teacher education. While conventional wisdom and the self‐representation of teacher education programs regard the source of teachers' knowledge about management and control to inhere in those received educational psychologies, sociologies, and philosophies which inform teacher training programs, the role of an everyday, commonplace pragmatics of teacher authority has not received the detailed scrutiny it warrants (see esp. Hatton, 1988).Among the many influences that mould the public image of children and childhood a critical but neglected force is that of the press. The present research examines the press as a source of everyday conceptualizations of children and childhood through a study of underlying themes in its representations of the child. Drawing on three data sets (The Sydney Gazette, The Sydney [Morning] Herald, and The Townsville Daily Bulletin) evidence is presented to reveal a consistent fragmentation of the concepts ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. It is argued that this conceptual fragmentation is a destabilizing force which, by unstated default, invests the teacher with an informally founded but substantial power source.The utterance of the simplest expression is an intervention in the world, more or less effective, more or less endowed with institutional authority.John B. Thompson (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press, p.131.... the text's career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of its author.Paul Ricoeur (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.201.* I wish to acknowledge the guidance of Discourse referees on an earlier version of this paper.