During the height of COVID and the Australian education system’s response to lockdowns, I opened a Google Doc and wrote an essay. I wanted to explore a number of concerns that had already been on my mind… technology, the measurement of achievement, meritocracy, and more… all of which seemed poised to accelerate rapidly during the pandemic. A year earlier, during the 2020 US election primaries, I came across a tweet (Xeet?) from then-Democratic candidate John Delaney, brimming with enthusiasm about the cost-saving (read: workforce-shedding/automation) potential of the online lessons his children were experiencing during lockdown. It was also with that in mind that I wrote the following.
The argument is muddled but it does get at a number of preoccupations I have regarding education and its trajectory: audit and accountability culture, the valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement, the contradictory reduction of education to measurements and standards whilst simultaneously lowering standards, the onward march of technology into the classroom with no regard for consequences. I wasn’t able the synthesise those topics in the following piece, but consider this a flagging of what I might discuss in future writing.
The giant, mutant, radioactive, laser-beam shooting elephant in the room since this was written is the arrival of AI, that has made many of my concerns into inevitabilities. Nonetheless, I never published it anywhere and since I’m doing this blog thing I ought to let it have it’s moment. May it serve as a time capsule, an earnest and now naive attempt to speak to a moment. Who knows where we’re going with this stuff now.
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Between the upload and the audit
The abrupt and sweeping shift to ‘online learning’, not simply webcam lectures but pre-prepared materials for repeated student access, has brought education to a critical juncture. In the wake of COVID-19 closures, the profession stands on the precipice of accelerated automation. This does not mean humanoid robots replacing teachers at the front of a classroom. Rather, it refers to a long-anticipated vision of efficiency-obsessed policymakers: the standardised delivery of a standardised curriculum to standardised students who are standardised-tested.
What first caught my attention was the speed and ease with which this shift was embraced, by teachers and policymakers alike. Teaching, once thought irreducibly human, is suddenly repackaged as something that can be streamlined, stored, and sent. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The arrival of online learning has collided with a compliance culture that had already been reaching fever pitch before COVID… logbooks, development plans, inspection frameworks, performance dashboards. Together, they are remaking the profession in real time. The human, improvisational, relational core of teaching is quietly being rendered invisible, replaced by something that looks like education but is trackable, reproducible, auditable.
A not-unlikely scenario looms: teachers worldwide stream or pre-record lessons distributed via platforms like Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and others. Teachers are then tasked with checking comprehension, clarifying points, and assessing retention. The trajectory is obvious: once the ‘ideal’ lesson is recorded, it can be infinitely reproduced… anywhere, anytime… for any number of students. Human teachers become redundant, reduced to content managers, if they are needed at all.
Many teachers see this as dystopian and improbable. They know firsthand the level of differentiation required to make one curriculum accessible to a diverse cohort. Yet for education bureaucrats chasing efficiency, accountability, and cost-cutting, this scenario is not a nightmare… it’s a dream. Former U.S. Congressman and 2020 Presidential candidate John Delaney offered a glimpse of that dream in a now-deleted tweet:
‘We now have a 7th grader, a college student and a law student at home, all e-learning and fully participating in their classes. This experience will change education and finally allow us to start lowering costs.’
The School-to-Work Pipeline Was Already Broken… Just Not at the School End
Even before COVID-19 devastated global economies, the legitimacy of education as a reliable path to employment was already crumbling. A 2019 report from the New York Federal Reserve revealed that college graduates (aged 22–27) were more likely to be unemployed or underemployed than the broader U.S. workforce. Australia fares no better. The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work has reported a 12% decline in full employment among university graduates since the GFC, with widespread insecurity and underemployment.
An honest economist would acknowledge that this trend correlates more with eroded labour protections and the rise of gig work than with educational failings. Still, students increasingly perceive the disjunction between education’s promises – personal growth, workforce readiness – and their bleak material prospects. COVID-19 has only magnified that gap.
David J. Blacker, Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Delaware, captures this tension in What’s Left of the World (2019). Students who fail to leap from education to employment are, as he writes, “no longer so much cogs in the machine as they are rendered external and incidental to it.” Schools and universities continue to promise what they can no longer deliver: prosperity through performance. As Blacker notes, “The conventional view… is that we can educate ourselves into prosperity… Most have seen through this long con already, but its animating presumptions continue to shape the legitimating language of formal education.”
Rather than recalibrate their goals, schools increasingly focus on ‘soft skills’, branding, and ceaseless self-optimisation. Students are urged to develop their ‘personal brand’ and ‘21st-century skills’, often in the absence of any viable job market. Australian high schools echo this rhetoric, presenting students with glitzy multimedia assemblies about the ‘jobs of the future’, extolling their multitasking and critical thinking skills… though rarely pausing to define what any of it actually means.
Teachers Must Articulate a Truer Vision of Education Post-COVID
The shift to online learning has also deepened the chasm between students of different class backgrounds, in ways that go far beyond the usual digital access debates. It’s not just that working-class students are less likely to have the latest iPads or stable internet, though that’s certainly true. The typical solution here is always more spending, more devices, more rollout. But the real inequity cuts deeper. These are the students most likely to live in precarious households, where both parents are working shifts, where quiet study spaces are scarce, and where ‘screen-free evenings’ are a distant fantasy. A report from the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that children from lower-income families are significantly more likely to exceed recommended daily screen time, due to a combination of household pressures and the ambient presence of connected devices throughout the home.
While middle-class families limit and supervise screen exposure… between piano lessons, tutoring, and prep-school enrolments… working-class students are being ushered into 24/7 digital dependency by the very institutions that claim to care most about their futures.
The irony is sharp. These are the same students who most need structure, knowledge, and consistency. Instead, they’re being handed devices and told to self-manage their learning, often through glittering online platforms and educators themselves offering inspirational videos and presentations about 21st-century skills. Meanwhile, as advocates of explicit instruction have convincingly argued, critical and creative thinking are not free-floating qualities, they sit atop a firm base of knowledge. Working-class students are increasingly denied access to that knowledge-rich curriculum, replaced instead with vague competencies and motivational tech-speak.
The result is a generation with access to the total archive of human information in the form of the internet, yet increasingly unable to sustain attention, resist distraction, or escape the anxiety-inducing churn of the online world. It’s no wonder the schools talk so much about ‘wellbeing’. They’ve created a system that destabilises it, then handed out breathing apps.
The pandemic has prompted a crisis of identity for educators. Are we here to prepare students for non-existent future jobs? To manage online learning environments? To drill scores for global benchmarking in a world where globalisation itself is unravelling?
Now more than ever, teachers must reclaim and redefine the meaning of education. First and foremost, teaching resists quantification. The most profound educational moments occur not in standardised tests or e-learning modules but in human exchange, between teacher and student, in real time.
Education is more than literacy and numeracy, though these remain essential. It is also more grounded and real than the utopian language of ‘future-focused learning’. Despite John Delaney’s cost-saving fantasies, transformative learning often resembles apprenticeship: student alongside teacher, in a context that values nuance, trust, and lived knowledge.
The best teachers aren’t manufactured through one-size-fits-all training. Teaching is highly idiosyncratic, its methods developed through lived experience, shared informally as ‘tricks of the trade’. While policymakers may bristle at the seeming lack of accountability, this contextual, grounded practice often outperforms top-down initiatives imposed by external consultants.
Teachers need what they’ve always needed: more time for preparation, deeper feedback cycles, smaller class sizes, and expanded support staff to meet complex student needs. Crucially, we also need broader measures of success that reflect what schools actually do… offer shelter, inspiration, socialisation, experimentation, and real-world experiences that transcend a student’s lot in life. These dimensions, though central to teaching, remain invisible to the current metrics of ‘growth’ and ‘achievement’.
Teachers Must Resist the Hollowing Out of Their Own Craft
In less than a decade of teaching, I’ve witnessed dizzying changes to the profession. Two final-year certificates, one failed national curriculum rollout, and waves of shifting expectations: literacy in maths, numeracy in English, research across every subject, laptops replaced by iPads, then by MacBooks… all while digital behaviour policies lagged behind. The teaching experience is one of being in a constant state of wondering ‘when did this come in?’ I’m quite sure nouns and adjectives haven’t changed meaning, Shakespeare and Pythagoras haven’t issued any recent proclamations… in my case music is still made from melody, rhythm and harmony, correct? Why do I feel like I’m constantly playing catchup?
The profession is in flux, but more alarming is how willingly teachers have accepted this churn. Though strikes have preserved wages, the erosion of working conditions continues largely unopposed.
Philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher once described ‘mechanisms of anxiety production’ as the systems and expectations – emails, logbooks, inspections, development plans – that keep workers in a state of constant low-level tension. Not enough to collapse under… just enough to stay responsive, pliant, too preoccupied to resist. Fisher wasn’t talking about schools in particular, but it’s hard to think of a more fitting description of the modern teacher’s working life. The encroachment is near total: replying to emails at 9pm, completing professional development modules late into the weekend, designing, editing, and uploading lesson plans to an online platform where they are quickly skimmed or ignored by students already caught in the whitewater churn of infinite content. None of this is accidental. It’s the whole point.
Fisher helps us see that this anxiety isn’t the result of poor organisation or bureaucratic clutter… it’s structural. It’s functional. The purpose is to keep us moving, adjusting, chasing whatever new measure, form, or update might land next. In a profession that already demands improvisation, judgment, and emotional labour, this constant managerial presence doesn’t just eat into time – it reframes what counts as work altogether. The quiet moments of real learning, the idiosyncratic lesson that lands just right with a particular group of students, the relationship built slowly and without fanfare… these disappear from view. In their place, a culture of perpetual audit – busy, noisy, self-referential – where the systems for checking learning become more visible than the learning itself.
Clinical psychologist David Smail traced a similar pattern back to the 1980s in The Origins of Unhappiness. Schools and universities, he argued, were remodelled in the image of private firms… not for genuine efficiency (which rarely arrived), but to destabilise and disorient workers, rendering them pliable to the language of “performance indicators” and “strategic alignment.” Teachers, disarmed by a flood of meaningless jargon, are left grasping for stability while their core work is obscured and devalued.
Smail saw this not merely as organisational change but as part of a deeper ideological project, what he called the “rhetoric of personal responsibility.” Structural constraints are reframed as individual failings: if a teacher is exhausted, they must have poor time management; if a student is disengaged, the fault lies in insufficient differentiation. Responsibility is drawn inward while power moves outward. You become the site of failure in a system designed to elude accountability. What remains is anxious striving, a kind of low-grade self-surveillance, and the slow erosion of meaning disguised as professionalism.
What emerges, then, is a strange paradox. On the surface, we are told that automation will lighten the load… replacing repetitive instruction with recorded content, freeing us to do more ‘meaningful’ work. But in practice, we find ourselves more burdened than ever, buried in bureaucratic rituals that demand constant justification, constant responsiveness. One logic says ‘less teaching labour,’ the other says ‘more administrative labour’… yet both strip teaching of its substance. The result isn’t liberation, but disorientation: a profession simultaneously automated and overworked, where the teacher becomes either a content replicator or a compliance node. In both cases, the human-to-human aspect of teaching becomes invisible. What remains is a facade: a quantified, distributed version of education that can be copied, archived, and inspected, yet no longer lived.
The rise of online learning has coincided with education’s deeper crisis: the invisibilisation of teaching’s core labor. In this context, a cost-conscious administrator may reasonably ask: if lesson plans, lectures, and assessments can all be stored and shared online, why are we still paying for teachers?
Industrial Action May Need To Evolve Beyond Strikes
Strikes alone may no longer suffice. As Mark Fisher suggested, more potent forms of resistance might emerge not from refusing to teach, but from refusing to comply… from opting out of the bureaucratic rituals that drain energy while offering nothing to students. Inspections for inspections’ sake. Logbooks no one reads. Professional development goal-setting that leaves no room to simply do the work. Pointless surveys. Endlessly rewritten departmental vision statements.
Fisher put it plainly:
“Students wouldn’t care if you’ve not filled in your logbooks… But the managers would care.”
This is the true battleground. The students wouldn’t care. The managers would. And we ought to think carefully about why that is.
referent 
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