Present-day schools of education have inherited a set of paradoxical beliefs and practices grounded in historical conditions that no longer apply. The authors argue that resolving these paradoxes is one of the biggest challenges that teacher education faces. HIGH QUALITY with minimal standards, professional schools without a professional knowledge base, high-quality student learning without consideration of how students learn, education through training -- American education is fraught with such paradoxes: statements, events, or actions that defy common sense, are self-contradictory, and yet may be true. Here we consider schools of education by examining their historical underpinnings and five burnt water paradoxes: such paradoxes represent both destruction (burning) and life (water). They emerge out of the history of schools of education and represent vibrancy and life in tandem with failure and destruction.1 These paradoxes weave through the evolution of schools of education in ways that have influenced their practice and structure and contribute to the challenges they face today. The paradox of professionalism. In thinking about the origins of this paradox, we realize that the history of schools and schools of education is intertwined with issues of gender that have contributed to the zeitgeist we see around schools of education today. This paradox consists of a situation in which teachers view themselves as professionals but work in a system that does not reward or recognize them with the status and respect accorded other professions. At the turn of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution brought assembly lines, and principles made the work so straightforward that the lines could be easily staffed for repetitive work and quality control. Economic expansion was accompanied by migrations to cities, which led to a crisis in staffing classrooms that was exacerbated by the short teaching careers of the young women who made up the vast majority of the teaching force. Education responded by developing management standards parallel to those used by industry, with the intention of making it easier to staff classrooms and deal with high teacher turnover and critical teacher shortages in large cities. Just as with assembly line workers, one goal was to spare teachers the burden of thinking about their work or making decisions.2 This approach to quality control also led to a gendered bureaucracy, in which men, who were viewed as professionals, were expected to supervise and train the women, who actually taught. Thus the paradox of professionalism was spawned, and teaching was devalued. Today, the paradox lingers through uncertainty about whether teaching is a profession or a form of blue-collar work that requires just a soupcon of formal training, followed by an apprenticeship. States contribute to the confusion by waiving standards for licensure and accepting teachers from even the most abbreviated alternative programs, while education policy continues to trumpet the rhetoric of the importance of high-quality teachers. The paradox of teaching and learning. This paradox also originated in the early 20th century and has sparked questions about how to prepare teachers and how students learn best. The focus on behavior -- what we can see -- as learning, both in industry and in education, gave rise to the teaching and learning paradox. The paradox is created when we expect education to prepare technically savvy critical thinkers in a system largely devoted to mechanistic approaches to teaching and learning, measured through traditional testing. The debates this paradox has sparked have resulted in a long, slow collision between those who support traditional ideas of teaching and learning and those who support more progressive ideas.3 Teacher education has focused for many years on mastery of a predetermined set of teaching methods derived in large part from the theory of behaviorism, which had a certain appeal to businesspeople and others who wanted education to emphasize scientific methodology and strict efficiency. …