In an essay on medical practice, Vivian Ota Wang (2000) questioned what she called the fallacy of neutral universalism. She argued that there are both overt and covert values underlying all medical practices and that these must be exposed and scrutinized if we are to understand the attitudes and actions of medical practitioners. She asserted, Western science fundamentally influences the character, methods, practices, ethos, ethics, and of medicine and has nurtured a medical paradigm that is based on the fragile infrastructure of universality and neutrality ... [these] are the primary sources used to justify the expectations and behavior of medical professionals, their patients, and society. (pp. 148-149) Wang's point that medical practice is never neutral, but is instead value-laden and ideological is similar to Michael Apple's arguments about educational practice. In the preface to the second edition of Ideology and Curriculum, for example, Apple (1990) argued, Discussions about what does, can, and should go on in classrooms are not the logical equivalent of conversations about the weather. They are fundamentally about the hopes, dreams, fears, and realities--the very lives--of millions of children, parents, and teachers.... Until we take seriously the extent to which education is caught up in the real world of shifting and unequal power relations, we will be living in a world divorced from reality. The theories, policies, and practices involved in education are not technical. They are inherently ethical and political, and they ultimately involve--once this is recognized-intensely personal choices. (p. viii) These arguments by Wang and Apple are consistent with the larger position that all social practice--whether in law, medicine, criminal justice, social service, or education--is value-laden and ideological rather than neutral and apolitical. Once the ideological basis of social practice is acknowledged, then it stands to reason that debates about how to reform practice--including educational practice--need to address openly the difficult choices and tradeoffs that all choices about values and entail. In recent debates about how to reform teacher education, however, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Rather than debate the ideals, commitments, and values that are (or ought to be) the basis of improvements in teacher education, reformers have implied or asserted that their positions were neutral, apolitical, and value free, based solely on empirical evidence and not embedded within or related to particular agendas that are both political and ideological. At the same time, it has become more and more common to use the term ideological to cast aspersions on, undermine, and ultimately dismiss positions that compete with one's own. James Gee (1996) made an intriguing argument along these lines in his volume on social linguistics and literacies, which was subtitled Ideology in Discourses. Gee pointed out that what he labeled Napoleon's was a significant moment in the history of the term ideology, a move that has become a classic rhetorical strategy for attacking views one does not like. (1) Gee explained, The Enlightenment philosophers had derived their views of what laws and governments ought to look like on the basis of a social theory of the mind, knowledge, and human beings. In attacking these philosophers, Napoleon used ideology as a term of abuse for a social policy which was in part or in whole derived from a social theory in a conscious way. Napoleon disliked the Enlightenment philosophers' social theory and its conclusions because they conflicted with his interests and his pursuit of power. Rather than arguing against this theory by arguing for a rival theory of his own, he castigates it as abstract, impractical, and fanatical. …