The improvement of teacher education in Russia to make it more appropriate to current conditions must involve changes in both techniques and the presentation-of-self of the teacher. The development of the schoolteacher as the carrier of socially and professionally significant abilities is a key task of pedagogical education today, one that is defined by the logic of the competency approach. In this article, the author examines, in sequence, the principles of the modernization of pedagogical education in Russia today--the conditions needed to convert from the mass system of the training of the teacher as subject specialist to a system of individual professional nurturing of the teacher as the carrier of socially significant qualities. (Contains 1 note.)