by Molly

The Contradictory Position of Public Educators

Paulo Freire understood that education is never neutral, but it is an inherently political act. It either liberates or domesticates, empowers or subjugates. For Freire, education and politics are inseparable, and to teach critically is an act of defiance and a direct challenge to oppression. He envisioned pedagogy as a practice of freedom.¹ Maxine Greene extends upon this vision, arguing that education must enable individuals to see beyond the given; that the capacity to think of alternative systems in a transformative way depends upon imagination and the development of new ways of seeing.² Yet this emancipatory potential exists within an institution shaped by the very social relations that critical education seeks to challenge. Teachers work within institutions that reproduce existing social relations, but their labour also involves developing the knowledge, imagination, and critical consciousness through which those relations can be understood and contested.

Whilst the classroom is a space where knowledge is collectively constructed and where students learn to question the ideologies that sustain their oppression, education is fundamentally a social institution shaped by class relations, and as such, schools also perform a conservative function in reproducing the existing social order. This contradiction takes concrete form in the decades of neoliberal reforms imposed on Victoria’s public schools. These measures prioritise accountability and high-stakes standardised assessment practices at the expense of the professional judgement of educators, effectively impugning the character and autonomy of teachers and the unions that support them. The overwhelming weight of compliance has effectively pushed the public education system into a structural crisis, exacerbated by a parallel, historical legacy of funnelling public revenue into private sectors that serve the already advantaged. These conditions have increasingly constrained teachers’ autonomy while expanding the demands placed upon their labour.

Teaching as Labour

Understanding this changing organisation of teaching requires looking beyond education policy to the organisation of teaching as labour. Teaching is not a self-contained profession that simply operates by expert judgement; it is a labour process embedded in the political economy of capitalism. Schools function as a key site of social reproduction: they help produce the workforce and habits of obedience, punctuality and discipline required for accumulation, while also helping stabilise social order. In the postwar Fordist settlement, mass schooling expanded alongside industrial production, as schools were increasingly required to develop a literate, numerate and rule-following workforce while contributing to the social cohesion and stability sought by the state. Teachers were therefore employed at scale as a stable, largely state-organised workforce. Yet within the Fordist school, the organisation of teaching remained relatively autonomous at the day-to-day level, with teachers retaining considerable discretion over how they planned, taught and organised learning, and with direct managerial control over their work remaining relatively limited. Teacher authority therefore relied on trust and professional judgement. So long as growth and profit rates remained relatively healthy, the state could tolerate this degree of autonomy as part of a broader settlement that maintained social reproduction without directly reorganising teaching according to the logic of industrial production.

It is this relative autonomy that contemporary education reform increasingly seeks to reorganise. Today, the broader Fordist settlement is being dismantled, and the relative autonomy once afforded to teachers has increasingly come into conflict with efforts to exert greater control over the organisation and measurement of their labour. As economic pressures intensify, governments increasingly treat education not as a social duty supporting reproduction, but as an investment requiring measurable returns. This shift drives standardised testing, data dashboards, external accountability regimes and prescriptive curricula that transfer knowledge and authority away from teachers and into systems, scripts and bureaucratic measurement. Viewed in class terms, these reforms represent an intensification and rationalisation of teaching labour. They seek to restructure the organisation of teaching through greater management, measurement and standardisation, aligning it more closely with capitalist imperatives of efficiency and cost containment. The effects of this reorganisation are therefore experienced not only as changes to policy, but as changes to the material conditions in which teaching takes place.

The Material Conditions of Public Education

The unprecedented level of membership within the Victorian branch of the AEU provides an important lens through which to examine educators’ collective response to the changing conditions under which they work. In March 2024, the Victorian Government delayed its Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) funding target from 2028 to 2031, a decision that stripped $2.4 billion from public schools and made Victoria the lowest funded public schooling system in Australia. As the Parliament of Victoria’s Legal and Social Issues Committee heard during its Inquiry into Public School Funding, chronic underfunding has not lessened schools’ obligations to their students, parents told the committee that families and teachers are now propping up essential education services that the government is failing to fund.³ Rather, schools are required to continue meeting the educational needs of their students without the level of funding identified as the minimum amount required to do so, effectively reconciling the resources available to them with obligations that remain unchanged. In practice, this looks like students missing out on timely interventions, physical and mental health supports and reasonable adjustments, alongside larger class sizes and a reduced capacity for schools to maintain and improve facilities.

These consequences are not distributed evenly. Schools serving communities experiencing greater levels of social and economic disadvantage are required to respond to more complex educational and social needs while operating within the same systemic constraints, meaning that inadequate resourcing can deepen the inequalities education is expected to address. Private schools in Victoria further received $10.8 billion more for capital works than public schools over the past decade, pulling in $1.4 billion in 2023 alone. ⁴Prefabricated, demountable classrooms (commonly referred to as portables) were intended as temporary solutions to curb surges in enrollment, but have become permanent features, plagued by poor insulation and ventilation and subjecting students to extreme temperature conditions. When not constructed from asbestos, these units have also been subject to leaking roofs and windows, mould growth, and inadequate accessibility for students with disability.

The consequences of under-resourcing are therefore inseparable from the labour required to compensate for it. Teachers’ workloads have expanded well beyond the core responsibilities of classroom teaching. Teachers report an average of 12 hours of unpaid overtime each week⁵, much of which can be attributed to administrative tasks. The growing emphasis on documentation, data and standardised assessment has increasingly directed teachers’ time and attention towards evidencing student performance for accountability purposes. NAPLAN exemplifies this shift, being the mechanism through which schools are compared, evaluated and, indirectly, funded, whilst narrowing curriculum provision and limiting the scope for teachers to exercise professional judgement. Only 30 per cent of teachers report intending to remain in the profession until retirement,⁶ raising broader concerns about teacher retention and the sustainability of the profession. The expansion of administrative and accountability work therefore represents more than an increase in workload. It is a reorganisation of teachers’ labour, transferring time and capacity away from the direct work of teaching while simultaneously increasing the demands placed upon it.

Teachers and the Working Class

These conditions also complicate the assumption that teachers occupy a professional position distinct from other forms of wage labour. The described material conditions not only shape teachers’ daily work, but also raise important questions about their position within the broader division of labour. Teachers are often assumed to belong to the professional managerial class (PMC), on the basis of their qualifications and specialised knowledge. But this framing fails to adequately account for their actual relationship to the organisation and control of their work. Understood as an intermediate stratum, the PMC typically exercise forms of delegated authority on behalf of institutions, reproducing the organisational and ideological relations of capital and the state.⁷ The social position of a worker is determined through their activity within the division of labour. Concretely, teachers do not control the direction or organisation of the institutions in which they work; their activity is shaped rather by the state’s policies, funding and curriculum. Their specialised knowledge does not, therefore, translate into control over the conditions or purposes of their labour. Instead, their professional capacities are exercised within an institution whose organisation is determined externally.

Teaching in the modern context is far more practical and socially intensive. This complex form of labour, compared to its traditional image, sees teachers organise activity, provide care, respond to complex social and emotional needs, and continually adapt their practice to the concrete development of students. Although teachers engage in intellectual labour through planning and administrative tasks, their work is increasingly distinct from the PMC model of professionals exercising authority through specialised knowledge on behalf of institutions. Teachers can best be understood as wage workers whose professional capacities are subordinated to the ends of public education and the state. Their qualifications and professional expertise do not alter this fundamental relationship to the organisation of labour: teachers possess specialised capacities, but do not determine the conditions under which thosecapacities are exercised. It is this relationship to the means and organisation of their labour that places teachers within the working class.

Teaching as Social Reproduction

This class position becomes particularly significant when teaching is understood as socially reproductive labour. Teaching involves organising the conditions through which students acquire knowledge, develop skills and capacities, and are prepared to participate in social life. It is therefore a social and collective form of labour, requiring teachers to organise activity, mediate relationships and transmit forms of knowledge and practice between generations. In this sense, teachers contribute to the reproduction of knowledge, skills and consciousness, situating education within the broader processes of social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to the processes through which the capacities, relationships and forms of knowledge necessary for society to continue are reproduced over time. Education is central to this process because schools provide an institutional setting in which these capacities are deliberately developed and social relations are reproduced through the organisation of learning. Schools therefore contribute to the reproduction of the knowledge and forms of socialisation through which individuals are incorporated into society.⁸

Social reproduction can be understood more precisely through the concept of labour-power. Labour-power refers to the physical or mental capacities that a person possesses and can put into motion through labour. These capacities are not fixed or self-sustaining. They must be continually reproduced through the processes that enable people to live, develop and maintain their capacity for labour. At the level of the working class as a whole, labour-power must also be reproduced across generations through the development of new workers. Education forms part of this process because the capacities through which people participate in social production are developed over time and through social institutions, such as schools. Teaching therefore contributes to the reproduction of labour-power through the development of knowledge, skills and capacities that students carry into further education, employment and social life.

The reproduction of labour-power has historically involved substantial amounts of labour within the household, including the everyday work of cooking, cleaning and washing clothes, caring for children, the elderly, or those unable to participate directly in production. Under capitalism, however, aspects of this reproductive labour have increasingly been organised through collective and paid institutions. This can be understood as the socialisation of reproductive labour: activities that were previously undertaken largely within individual households become organised through institutions in which workers collectively perform reproductive functions. Education is a significant example of this process. The development and care of children is distributed across teachers and other education workers within schools, alongside the reproductive labour performed within families and other institutions. Teaching is consequently situated within a broader social organisation of reproductive labour, rather than existing as an isolated act of knowledge transmission. This work is also highly gendered. Education and training is one of the most female-dominated areas of employment in Australia, alongside healthcare and social assistance, meaning that women are disproportionately concentrated in paid forms of socially reproductive labour.

Teachers’ Collective Power

The AEU’s strike action demonstrated the social necessity of public education and the central role of teachers within it. School stoppages disrupted not only the provision of education but the wider organisation of social and economic life, as families and communities were required to withdraw or reorganise their own labour to undertake forms of care upon which the education system, and society more broadly, depends. This disruption exposes a fundamental structural paradox: while the modern economy relies entirely on schools to free up adult labor for market production, schools themselves remain entirely dependent on the unremunerated domestic care maintained within the household. Ultimately, these systems form a tightly wound relay, where the breakdown of institutional schooling immediately forces the private sphere to absorb a labor burden it was never structurally equipped to carry alone. The extent to which this labour must be replaced when teachers withdraw from it reveals the material basis of their position within the working class. Teachers are workers whose labour is necessary to the reproduction of society, and whose collective withdrawal from that labour can disrupt the reproduction of social and economic life.

The events of the AEU campaign should therefore be understood as a struggle extending beyond wages and working conditions to the organisation and control of teaching labour itself. At stake is whether teachers retain meaningful control over the knowledge, judgement and collective authority through which their work is performed, or whether these are progressively subordinated to managerial forms of control shaped by austerity and market discipline. The struggle over teachers’ working conditions is consequently also a struggle over the conditions under which socially necessary labour is organised and over who has the authority to determine its purpose.

Endnotes

1. Giroux,. Pauo Freire’s Legacy.,137 ↩︎
2. Greene, Releasing the Imagination, p19. ↩︎
3. Parliament of Victoria, Parents Warn Public Schools Have ‘Become the Charity‘, news release ↩︎
4. AEU Vic Branch, $10bn infrastructure gap leaves Victorian public schools behind ↩︎
5. AITSL, Australian Teacher Workforce Data  National Trends ↩︎
6. Longmuir et al . What the profession needs now for the future: , p5 ↩︎
7. Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich The Professional-Managerial Class. p13-14 ↩︎
8. Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus, p156 ↩︎

Bibliography

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Giroux, H. A.. Pauo Freire’s Legacy and Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times. Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 40, 136-149., Spring 2025

Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.

Longmuir, F., Delany, T., Lampert, J., & Wilkinson, J. What the profession needs now for the future: Final Report (Report commissioned by the Australian Education Union Victorian Branch). Monash University, 2026

Parliament of Victoria. Parents Warn Public Schools Have ‘Become the Charity’ as Funding Shortfalls Bite. News release, April 17, 2026. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/news/general-news/school-funding.