This article draws on research among very experienced secondary teachers in New Zealand to show that a prolonged period of neo-liberal education policies can have a lasting effect on teachers' memories of their own radical past. Despite the existence in the 1970s and 1980s of an emerging consensus among secondary teachers that the traditional norm-referenced qualifications system needed radical reform, by 2004 a sample of teachers who had taught through all or most of that period failed to recall the profession's advocacy for change. Change, including qualifications reforms that the profession had been first to advocate, was typified by them as externally imposed. This poses a major challenge to those who seek to reclaim and revoice teaching's radical past.