This paper traces long-standing philosophical, sociological and political tensions that have been at the core of narratives about state-funded teacher education, since its inception in England. These tensions are still visible today in debates around the professional knowledge of teachers, such as those described in Furlong (2013). Historiographical evidence leads to questioning the new "truce" being forged at the moment around acceptable ways of settling disagreements about teacher professionalism and teacher education, for example through the discursive redeployment of terms such as "common sense", "resilience" and "craft". From "virtuous common sense", in the mid-19th century, through "scientific pedagogy" near the turn of the 20th century and "the science of lighting a fire" in the mid-20th century, and to the ideological clashes surrounding the turn of the millennium, there have been numerous attempts to construct public accounts of teacher knowledge and attributes, and of teacher education. The absence of teachers as powerful participants in this construction is palpable. Philosophers can contribute to the "untelling" of these stories by carefully picking discursive threads that were not foregrounded in the policy and political filtering of public accounts of teaching, and reconnecting them to traditions of argument about teaching as a practice.