In this essay, the authors suggest that there is another, different and more ancient way of looking at the moral and social role of the teacher and the processes of education in which she is involved. This alternative perspective draws on older, more imaginative and complex sources of meaning than the latest Gallup poll or the latest adjusted performance indicator. It offers a rival interpretation of teaching and learning which, if actualised, has the potential to be more directly enabling than currently dominant modalities in allowing students to respond creatively to modern social conditions. The older tradition that this essay explores is rooted in the notion of the "Trickster" figure: an important character in legend and story, social and symbolic practices across a broad range of world cultures. In the first section of this essay the authors draw upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis to help understand the manner in which many aspects of the modern imaginative lives have been closed down by two major features of modernity towards which the Trickster figure is traditionally opposed. The first of these is the development of an overdependence upon an "arithmetic calculus" as the primary mythic, and therefore heuristic, device of culture. The second is the rupture with history which has impoverished the storehouse of people's collective imagination. The authors then go on to establish the Trickster figure as a social and moral signifier that might offer an alternative hermeneutical tool to the arithmetic for the interrogation and interpretation of their deepest experiences. In the second section of the essay they explore the distinctively "Celtic" Trickster as a way of giving this universal signifier a specifically local character. Here they try to understand the process of contestation and inversion as an ethical and educational practice. In the final section of the argument they try to elucidate some of the pedagogic implications of deploying the Trickster image in the classroom. (Contains 8 notes.)