Teachers don’t have to be amazing people to be paid properly

In the wake of pay equity blockages, a thousand or so people went to Parliament Lawn to protest the new Budget, where women and gender minorities have once again taken the fall for commerce and the army. To make the crowd show appreciation for the suffering workforces, the emcee asked us if we’d ever had an incredible teacher who changed our lives. I’m currently enrolled in primary teacher training, and have been thrilled to find a job I actually enjoy and find meaningful. But I did not raise my hand at the rally.

Teaching falls under the rubric of care work, as it’s called. This work is often defined in positive terms; making someone feel better, comforting people during times of loss, healing their body, helping them learn something beneficial. This represents care work when it’s done well, but that bias sidesteps what the term means. If we define care work more neutrally, the crux of it involves producing changes in someone’s body, mind, and emotions. The value of this is, or should be, self-evident; we are all interdependent, and often need help making changes to our bodies, minds and emotions. The flipside of the good care worker, however, is those who harm their students, patients, clients, children. And if we’re going to properly uphold the value of care work, we need to be honest about what’s happening in those professions.

The truth is, I never had any life-changing, incredible teachers in primary school (or high school, although some of them I liked and/or learned from). I clearly imbibed some useful things in primary; all that literacy and maths and science knowledge came from somewhere, even if I don’t remember the precise learning of it. But emotionally and psychologically speaking, the differences my teachers made to my life were negligible to bad. When I was eight, I had a teacher called Miss Harkness; our class kept a running tally of how many of us she made cry. When I was ten, Miss Hooper gerrymandered me out of receiving a popularity-based class award. Most of the time, it felt like my schoolteachers were there to run interference between me and my friends.

As an adult, I’m not motivated to teach so that today’s kids have a better experience than I did; nothing so noble. I do it because kids are interesting, funny, weird, creative and fulfilling people to work with, and in-person work is vastly healthier for me than anything computer-based (notwithstanding the horrific amounts of admin involved in teaching). If you don’t have children, schools are one of the main places to spend sustained time with tamariki, but that’s not a particularly good thing.

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As social structures, schools represent many things for tamariki. They are institutions of discipline (in both good and bad ways), an escape from abusive homes, a place to hang out with your friends, a building where your bullies can hurt you, a place where your culture is respected, a place where it’s repressed, the home of intellectual learning, the home of mind-numbing drudgery. School is also the holding pen into which our deeply anti-child society shunts tamariki; a place to be minded while their parents work all day to pay the landlord, and to prepare them for the same deadening routines in adulthood.

Given my own school experiences, I was shocked to enjoy primary teaching. I suspect pedagogy has improved since my time; these days I think most people wouldn’t cope with the job unless they had some genuine enjoyment of tamariki. Even so, schools are still largely teaching tamariki be good little subjects of empire; through problems at systemic levels and through some teachers’ personal choices. Moreover, care work—in its neutral definition above—creates a power dynamic. Some teachers want to control people, and teaching is the avenue that suits them. Some of them abuse their power and ruin kids’ lives, such as music teacher Charles Harter who molested nine of his students.

All this goes to show that we can’t make pay equity arguments on moral grounds about teachers’ behaviour. No one is out there saying that electricians are lifesavers and learning enablers; workers are only forced into morality debates when their job’s value is being questioned. If teachers must all be incredible entertainers, magicians, geniuses and therapists rolled into one, any bad behaviour theoretically nullifies their claim to better pay and good conditions. Perhaps teachers’ unions are nervous to admit just how many adults have memories of bad teachers who hurt them.

Of course, we can’t win people over simply with “Hey, remember those jerks who gave you childhood trauma? You should put yourself on the line to get them better pay!” But being honest about bad teachers is an argument for improved conditions, not against them. And we don’t have to confine our appeals to parents, as though no other adult can be compelled to care about schools. Any adult who went through the school system remembers moments of childhood suffering in a child-hostile society, shoved into overcrowded classrooms and left to the whims of shitty teachers (not to mention parents).

You, adult readers, deserved a childhood education where your opinions mattered, where you weren’t neglected or abused, where teachers had the time and motivation to facilitate your growth rather than just putting out fires, where the system was structured to protect you from power-trippers. Our rights as children weren’t supported by most of our elders; I’m sure many of them also said “I don’t like kids” as casually as declaring a dislike for inanimate objects. At what point will we collectively break the cycle for the next generation of people?

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Children’s subjugation is tied closely to women’s subjugation, although women also act as children’s oppressors. Historically, schools and teaching did not even admit women, much less enable them to dominate the profession. The reason the job is female-dominated now is because it more closely resembles other forms of care work. In the 19th century, capitalism tried to conceal care work by not giving it any wage at all, treating it as superfluous to the real work done in factories by men (and women, and children). As more of that physical labour was outsourced to poorer non-Western countries, the West entered a post-industrial economy which requires those care-based skills.

Teachers are now expected to teach children qualities that are useful for relational service work—listening, communicating, cooperating, doing emotional work for each other—as well as the literacy and maths they’ll still need in office jobs or retail. These are welcome changes from the era of rigid disciplinarians holding a strap or cane at the front of the classroom. Unfortunately, the refusal to reduce class sizes means the entire system is much more reliant on a revolving door of burned-out teachers.

Large class sizes are crucial to an institution designed to fail children in specific ways. Dominant society wants workers who have grown up accustomed to not having their needs met, being confused and muddling through with minimal instruction, being yelled at by teachers who can’t manage crowd control, having their creative work graded and degraded out of existence, idolising and fearing authority. These issues in schools have changed, hopefully lessened, but never quite gone away.

In 2020, governments called teachers and carers “essential workers”. But it wasn’t because they’d newly realised our work was underpinning the entire economy; it’s because we now had an overriding motivation to quit work. In 2025, the coalition government is very aware of how important our work is; showing them examples of great teachers are will not fix the problem. Coming down on women like this is a deliberate show of misogynist power. We’re going to extract your vital, life-changing labour while paying you jack shit, and you dumb bitches will do it anyway because you care too much about children, old people, sick people. Men in the coalition government probably buy into the lie that women do care work instinctively—why should we pay someone for biological instinct—because it helps them avoid realising that they personally (not all men, indeed!) are choosing to be lazy and mean by not doing it.

Teachers don’t have to portray ourselves as saints. As long as there exists a person or group of people who need something explained to them, our job will be relevant. Good working conditions—including in training—and good pay will enable better teachers to come into the job and stay there. But even the worst teachers aren’t as useless and destructive as landlording, fighter jets and David Seymour.

This was written and contributed to 1/200 by an anonymous student teacher