I believe in the promise of public education. It remains one of the last shared institutions capable of sustaining democracy and equity. But we cannot ignore how the system exploits the very teachers it depends on.
We are told that teaching is a “calling.” That the best educators are those who are passionate, who “go above and beyond” for their students. At first glance, this sounds like praise. But scratch the surface and you see a carefully constructed political tool: passion as a mechanism of control.
Historically, feminized professions, nursing, social work, teaching, have been framed as vocations of moral duty rather than professions of labor. Max Weber described this as the sacralization of work; Hannah Arendt went further, noting how societies obscure the line between labor and devotion to extract more from workers without recognizing their sacrifice as labor. When education policymakers and administrators celebrate teacher passion, they reinforce this same logic: your devotion to children is the reason we don’t have to pay you fairly.
Economically, this is a classic surplus-value problem in Marxist terms. The system extracts unpaid labor, the extra hours grading, planning, emailing parents, attending unpaid meetings, and cloaks it in the language of love and dedication. In neoliberal terms, it’s a transfer of public cost onto the private lives of teachers, subsidized not by policy but by exhaustion.
Philosophically, Paulo Freire warned that systems of domination disguise themselves as benevolent. The myth of passion functions this way: it frames sacrifice as virtue, erasing the structural neglect that forces teachers into martyrdom. Passion becomes a shield for systemic failure.
In reality, the myth of passion does not liberate teachers; it disciplines them. It creates a culture where refusal, to grade at midnight, to answer emails on weekends, to spend personal money on supplies, is seen as a lack of care for children. Passion becomes the rhetorical cudgel that turns boundaries into selfishness.
Passion should fuel innovation, not mask exploitation. If we want strong public schools, we must replace invisible sacrifice with visible support. Otherwise, we will continue to build our education system on the exhaustion of the very people holding it together.
If we truly value public education, we must stop romanticizing teacher sacrifice and start legislating teacher support. Passion cannot be the excuse for unpaid hours, depleted classrooms, and exhausted educators. Parents, students, and communities can push back by asking what “going above and beyond” really costs — and who is paying that price. And teachers: remember that your boundaries are not a failure of devotion, but an act of resistance against a system that depends on invisible labor. Passion belongs in the classroom, not in your exhaustion. The future of public education depends on all of us demanding that passion be honored with policy, resources, and respect.