Written by: Louisa L. on 25 February 2026
Just before the 2025 school holidays a Public Education Workers Alliance (PEWA) meeting in western Sydney, heard a jaw dropping appraisal, Have I improved enough yet? Teaching and the labour process, about what students, teachers and NSW state schools face day to day, and why.
The teacher, researcher, activist began, ‘Today I want to make a simple argument: Public education is collapsing … not … because teachers have failed. It is collapsing because the work of teaching has been reorganised into a labour process under capitalism.
‘Over the past forty years, teaching has been rebuilt around measurement, data cycles, standards, audits, and now, AI. None of this is accidental. These reforms form a pattern, not a series of isolated initiatives. And that pattern only makes sense if we understand teaching as work – work that is increasingly managed, monitored, intensified and standardised in the same way other forms of labour have been reorganised during periods of capitalist crisis.
‘My aim today is to give us a way of seeing that pattern clearly.’
From the 1980s
When I began teaching in the NSW state system in the early 1980s, a huge wave of collective struggles led by the NSW Teachers Federation had transformed education and the lives of teachers. Higher wages, much smaller class sizes and, in high schools at least, free periods gave much more time for planning, marking and more democratic decision-making.
Rigidly enforced top-down syllabuses were replaced by more progressive models designed by committees of teachers. The Junior High English syllabus was four foolscap pages, double-spaced. We were to teach reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical and creative thinking.
More importantly, we were told, ‘Start with the child’ (or in high school ‘the young person’).
State governments, Liberal or Labor, began nibbling at the edges of collective unity with funding cuts and attacks on school staffing formulas. In 1988, Liberal Minister Terry Metherell laid out the whole neo-liberal agenda of cuts, closures and rewritings to every corner of public education. 80,000 teachers and supporters filled the Sydney Domain, impaling Metherell’s political career. His agenda remained. Rather than one fell swoop, it was implemented in a thousand smaller attacks.
The author traces the beginning particularly to a 1994 book, ‘Total Quality Management in the Public Sector’. That same year starting with the child was ditched in favour of ‘outcomes’ that students ‘should achieve’. ‘Should’ pretends morality, that someone or something is ‘failing’ if whatever the word is attached to isn’t done. It’s a nasty term, especially when dumped on teachers, or worse, on young people and children.
A fully managed labour process
The PEWA presenter used Marx’s analysis of the labour process to explain ‘why crises push workplaces toward standardisation, surveillance and automation’; how the 1970s’ profitability crisis led to the rise of managerial reform based on Frederick Taylor’s stopwatches and managerial control, Henry Ford’s assembly line methods, plus W. Edwards Deming’s Statistical Process Control (developed in the US military) and the Toyota Production Systems from post-war Japan via the Chicago School, ‘to transform teaching from a high-trust profession to a fully managed labour process’.
All this leads ‘to the role of AI in schools, and to the contradiction between what teachers are required to do for the system and what teachers actually do to keep classrooms functioning.’
‘My thesis is this: teaching has been progressively transformed into a managed labour process as part of a decades-long attempt to stabilise a capitalist system in crisis. The pressures we feel every day … are not educational reforms. They are tools of labour control.’
The presenter also pinpointed cracks from which collective resistance can grow, as pressure builds in classrooms and schools.
Stripping knowledge from workers
Some readers will be familiar with how capital extracts more absolute or relative surplus value through extending the working day or by making production more efficient through simpler repetitive tasks and/or replacing human labour by machinery.
Teachers are subject now to both methods of extraction. Their workloads demand endless hours beyond the classroom.
But more decisively, ‘If education is framed as the main driver of economic growth, two policy consequences follow immediately:
1. Teachers must be measurable. If you are an investment, you require metrics.
2. Teaching must be standardised. If outcomes matter, variation must be reduced.’
It means, the presenter continued, ‘The teacher’s work is not judged through human relationships or pedagogical judgement, but through the data they produce.’
‘Knowledge is stripped from workers and embedded in systems,’ he says, as all teaching resources are appropriated by online reporting systems. Creative work is stolen by Google classroom and numerous other online platforms.
The author continues, ‘Because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as constant capital rises, capitalism reorganises labour, bringing in more control, more measurement, more machinery, less autonomy.’
Taylor, who in 1900 wrote, ‘All possible brain work should be removed from the shop floor and placed in the planning department’, would be cheering from the sidelines.
Death by a thousand acronyms
The zoo of ever more educational acronyms has long been a stock staffroom joke. Here’s just a few: Total Quality Management (TQM), Human Capital Theory (though it’s not usually an acronym, because this high-minded poison reduces young people to bundles of capital to be exploited and ‘value-added to’), School Excellence Framework (SEF), New Public Management described by the author as ‘the administrative arm of neoliberalism, of which TQM is just one example’), Department of Education (DoE), Director, Educational Leadership (DEL) plural (DELs) the enforcers of the latest mandatory acronym on principals, School Excellence Plan (SEP), Employee Performance Management Improvement (EPMI) teams within Professional and Ethical Standards (PES) who sack teachers who ‘fail’ arbitrary three month TIPs (Teacher Improvement Plans) in just three months.
TIPs are the cruellest of jokes. Not about education. Not about improvement. About scaring everyone into submission. Union reps have been just the latest targets.
While every other aspect of education is cut to the bone, CESE – the Centre for Educational Statistics and Evaluation – staffed by non-teachers, has grown exponentially.
Meanwhile, the school is reduced to ‘an input-output machine’.
All of this groundwork means, he continues, ‘You plug AI into a process that’s been made machine-readable.’
‘Following Marx’s logic, this is management’s endgame: the mind of the worker extracted, recomposed, and returned externally as dead labour.’
Students need our living labour
Our students are the heart of what we do. Our working conditions are their learning conditions.
They need our living labour. This is the key, placing students’ needs at the centre of any fightback.
Australia under US imperialist control no longer needs the working class or the underclass to be educated. It cares nothing for our young people. But the children of the rich and powerful, or those brilliant ‘underlings’ they try to coopt through their scholarships, are not subjected to this criminal crushing of our youth.
Massive government funding and private fees ensure the richest and most nourishing programs of art, music, science, sport are provided to the upcoming managers. But tainted by ruling class ideology to justify their privilege.
This monstrous injustice is a contradiction waiting to be tapped for change. It can be one clarion call for wider action. Despite brainwashing and lies, even some from the elitist system will reject injustice because that richer education makes them open their eyes.
Every education worker, every progressive will gain strength from this short, groundbreaking article.
It concentrates and explains the personal experience of all teachers as they and their students are mortally wounded.
If we understand our opponent, if we understand its strategy and tactics, we can step by step fight back, putting young people front and centre.
First published 4 February 2026 by Spirit of Eureka)
