Why Aren’t Teachers Able to Work?

“We are measuring people against goals they never chose.” -Ray Bennett

Recently, our new Minister of Education asked a deceptively simple and deeply provocative question: 

“Why are teachers unable to work?” 

Only sheer ignorance or rare brilliance can produce a question that clean. I would add another:

Why are so many children refusing to go to school at all?

We talk endlessly about burnout, absenteeism, anxiety, and disengagement, but we avoid the most uncomfortable possibility. What if this is not a crisis of motivation, but a crisis of relevance?

Could it have anything to do with the fact that our education system became outdated the moment the internet arrived? Or tablets? Or smartphones? Or now, artificial intelligence?

Teachers are expected to step out of the real world and into school buildings where technology and real work are effectively told to wait outside. Inside, we open the same books, teach the same content, and follow the same structures I did. And my father did before me.

Take the Pythagorean theorem. I studied it. My father studied it. His generation was punished or strapped if they did not “get it.” My generation was streamed, quietly told who was “university material” and who was not - in so many words. Kids were/are systematically divided up. The overachievers get to believe they are more intelligent, not just more privileged. 

It took a lot of kicking and screaming, but we have moved past corporal punishment and abuse in

Newfoundland. But we have not moved past the sorting.

Today, students walk into classrooms carrying more computing power in their pockets than NASA had when it landed on the moon. AI can answer any factual question, explain the reasoning behind it, write the paper, break it down, quiz you on it, and generate an A-grade response in seconds.

And yet, paradoxically, students are more anxious, more disengaged, and more resistant than ever.

They refuse to write tests they do not care about, to earn grades that increasingly reflect the failure of the system, not the limits of their intelligence. The tragedy is this. Teachers now have every tool imaginable to create engaging, project-based, meaningful learning, the very reason many of them entered the profession in the first place. Instead, too many become trapped in a dreary institutional loop. Staffroom talk. Compliance. Judgment. Gossip. Complaint. Not because they do not care, but because the system rewards obedience over imagination.

If the Minister believes policy alone will fix this, he is in for a rude awakening. Systems do not reform themselves. Change will come, if it comes at all, from teachers. Not by abandoning curriculum, but by putting it in its proper place. Imagine a teacher who says this to their students:

“Ten percent of your day belongs to the system, because we have to play the game. The other ninety percent belongs to you.”

That ninety percent is for discovering strengths, skills, interests, and identity, especially for students who are not team captains, straight-A students, elite musicians, or beneficiaries of enrichment trips and carefully polished pathways. Those students will likely be fine either way. I am talking about the underachievers, the children without access to tutors, networks, advocacy, or second chances, the ones labeled "learning disabled," “difficult,” “unmotivated,” or “problematic,” often as a stand-in for unmet needs, unrecognized ability, lack of resources, or lives shaped by instability rather than choice.

Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft, argues that meaningful work, especially work that is tangible, skill-based, and grounded in reality, does something modern schooling often fails to do. It gives people competence, agency, and identity. Working with your hands, solving real problems, seeing cause and effect, these are not lesser forms of intelligence. They are deeply cognitive, deeply human, and deeply affirming. Crawford’s insight is not about shop class specifically. It is about respecting reality and the learner’s relationship to it.

When education builds students up instead of sorting them out, something remarkable happens. Strengths surface. Confidence follows. Identity forms. Instead of leaving school with crippling anxiety and a sense of inadequacy, students leave knowing who they are, what they can do, and where they belong in the world.

That is the true purpose of education. Not grades. Not compliance. Not test scores.

Identity.

-Barry Smith

#mentoring