This article begins with a description of Salvador Dali's 1931 work "The Persistence of Memory" which is said to have been painted following a hallucinatory episode. The painting is likened to an assault on rationality, and the author explains the similarities of the past 40 years of teacher education to the surrealism movement in art. One of the more recurrent themes in teacher education of the past 40 years concerns the continuous onslaughts on teacher education by external forces such as governments and their fickle and ever changing policies, and the ever present efforts to regulate, marketize, corporatize, control and blame teacher education across successive governments and regimes of various political persuasions. The author states that the situation where teacher education is so much at the mercy of government policy is not surprising given that every activity conducted in the name of education is a political act. She takes the position that while education as a social activity is impacted upon simultaneously by the social, political and economic contexts of a society at any given time, the fact remains that the policies that guide and direct education as a social activity, emanate from and reside within the political context. The author concludes by saying that just as Dali in the sequel piece to "The Persistence of Memory" entitled "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory" depicted the potential for man to be the architect of his own destruction, the neoliberal turn and the new networks of power to which they have given rise, could also signal the destruction of the integrity, pedagogies, epistemologies and philosophical bases of teacher education that teacher educators wish to perpetuate.