Contemporary teacher education, like other aspects of tertiary education, involves regimes for assessing quality of teaching. These regimes include student assessment of and feedback on teaching. These are widely considered problematic, and yet there are few signs that teacher educators reject the notion that student responses have something of value to offer. This paper examines some evidence of student responses to teaching in teacher education institutions in the first half of the twentieth century, in order to provide means to reflect on regimes for securing and using students' responses to teaching and curriculum in contemporary teacher education. Specifically, it examines evidence from a range of teacher education institutions in England and Australia. Evidence of student responses to teacher education programs in this period is, in fact sparse, but can be derived from student magazines, two systematic attempts to gather (already "historical") information, and from some of the reports on teacher training institutions by His Majesty's Inspectors in the UK. The evidence indicates that students were keenly and often critically aware of the differences between teaching styles, subject content and the effectiveness of different staff and components of their programs. It also reveals that they had a keen interest in the relationship between college curricula and school practice, and its implications for their own preparation as teachers. Their views differed widely among themselves; they also ranged unevenly from a good humoured and often deeply ironic sense of the absurdity of aspects of their programs (in particular the demonstration lesson) through a sense that they were poorly served by some staff and subjects, to a recognition of enduring and (they seem to imply) unresolvable tensions in the process of teacher education. (Contains 1 footnote.)