Social capital theorist Robert Putnam (2007) argued that diversity produces fear and leads people to disconnect from one another. For student teachers, diversity of whatever kind--ethnicity, religion, class, disability, gender, or sexuality--generates fear and an expectation that it has to be managed. Civic education within teacher education has a crucial role in facilitating an active engagement with diversity among beginning teachers, and the author argues that teacher education can and should do this by providing students with opportunities to encounter diversity--opportunities that provoke and require change. She contends that teacher education is the ideal place for beginning teachers to acquire a "passion for equality", and far from compromising their intellectual independence, it is likely to strengthen it.