The historical development of teacher education in New Zealand manifests several major contradictions and tensions. One if these involves two conflicting models of teacher education that have historically struggled for dominance. The first model holds teaching to be an essentially practical craft involving classroom management, whilst the second accepts the need for these skills but also sees teaching as a learned profession. A further and related contradiction, however, has been that whilst there has been a steady upgrading of institutional aspirations and induction programmes from early links with trade training to a broader identification with teacher education, successive displacements have often masked a corresponding increase in state control and surveillance. This paper argues that, despite more than a century of apparently progressive restructuring, these unresolved contradictions still remain clearly evident across the increasingly complex and diverse teacher education sector in early twenty first century New Zealand.