In 2013, more than forty years after the publication of Deschooling Society, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claimed that Ivan Illich’s work had reached its ‘hour of legibility’. The dictum by Agamben was taken by many as an opportunity to revisit the Austrian-born public intellectual’s work and read it under a different light. The intention of this paper is not dissimilar, as it seeks to provide an interpretation of Illich’s work on education, with a particular focus on the critiques he exacted against schoolteachers. The purpose, however, is not to re-evaluate the validity of his claims, but to take his critiques and place them against our current state of affairs.

Briefly, Ivan Illich accused schoolteachers in the 1970s of utilising their moral and professional expertise to confuse students and society more widely about the place of learning in social life. He viewed their work as a form of gatekeeping that established limits on what people were meant to learn and when they should learn it. Illich read the teacher as embodying “a secular priesthood” that sold institutional legitimacy, which effectively promoted the establishment of a monopoly of knowledge and commodified education.

Fifty years later, the social conditions for schooling have changed greatly, and so has the role of expertise in educators’ work. Many decades into the neoliberalisation of education, we encounter schoolteachers that are far from possessing a status of authority via their expertise. Instead, they either display indifference to the vocational aspects of the role or become increasingly vocal with stories that echo of disempowerment and alienation. The question emerges: what are the implications for the schooling institution of having teachers whose sway is being eroded?

This paper uses evidence from an ongoing study into the lives of teachers working in hard-to-staff schools in Australia (my place of work and residence) to underscore the vulnerable position that many educators find themselves in at present, especially within the context of the ongoing national teacher shortages. Factors of their discontent like the negative portrayal of the profession in the media, increasing onsite issues such as behaviour management, and the precarious support some teachers receive from school leadership stand contrary to Illich’s portrayal of the teacher’s imposing figure. By revisiting Illich’s work on education in light of the present situation, we hope to not only question the state of the instrumental role that teachers have had vis-à-vis the schooling institution, but ask how their disenfranchisement may impact the future of public education.

The presentation will rely on the critical reading of texts written by and about Ivan Illich, with particular focus on his widely-known text 'Deschooling Society' (1971) and the essay 'Disabling Professions' (1977). Also, it will draw on literature from the field of sociology of education. Particularly, it will review the recent work of scholars interested in teachers' authority and expertise, texts that continue to be critical of the project of mass schooling, as well as some relating to the bureaucratization of the school and the overdetermination of the work of teachers. In addition, this paper will present an analysis of data gathered from semi-structured interviews done to teachers, as it informs the findings of a nationally funded study into the lives of teachers who remain working in hard-to-staff schools in times of teacher shortages.

In the context of international teacher shortages, questions about the sustainability of the profession abound. Realities of exhaustion, burnout and exploitation are becoming more prominent at the same time as education researchers, government bodies and unions try to find responses to teacher attrition and retention. This paper takes stock of this situation to provoke a more fundamental question into the changing nature of teachers' work. It hopes to engage with the consequences of teacher disempowerment and its impact on the greater schooling institution.

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