4 min readJun 19, 2026 06:24 AM IST
First published on: Jun 19, 2026 at 06:24 AM IST
Schools are shut for the summer holidays. Yet for the past few years, a sword has hung over these vacations. There is always the uncertainty that they may be cut short, teachers may be called back, or assigned some new duty. Earlier, summer holidays were one of the incentives of the teaching profession, especially for women balancing home and work. Today, teaching may still be described as a part-time job, but it takes up more time than many full-time ones.
Teachers in both private and government schools return home much like their students, carrying bags full of “homework” — preparing assignments, checking notebooks, filling out report cards, and completing administrative tasks. Work spills into the little “free time” that belongs to their personal lives and families.
The Covid years accelerated this process. Online teaching ensured continuity in children’s education. But that connectivity has since become a tool for exploitation. Teachers can be asked at any hour to submit reports, data, or documents, and are expected to comply immediately. The boundaries between the professional and the personal have all but disappeared. Perhaps that is why the old reverence embodied in “Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu…” now survives largely as a ritual saved for Teachers’ Day. In reality, teachers are now marionettes, expected to obey instructions and whims without question.
This becomes particularly visible in the endless non-academic duties assigned to them. Recently, news emerged from Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly that teachers had been assigned the task of collecting fodder. The order was later modified following protests. Such examples are not unusual. Teachers are routinely assigned election duties, Census work, surveys, data-entry campaigns, mid-day meal management, and other such duties. Time that could be spent improving classroom practice or developing professional expertise is consumed by tasks far removed from teaching. In the process, the profession loses its intellectual freedom.
The problem with this epidemic of perpetual busyness is that teachers are left with no free time to read, think, create, or explore new things. Leisure is the condition that makes intellectual life possible. Yet this space for reflection is steadily being taken away from us. I am often reminded of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Lost Time”, though in a context quite different from his spiritual one. Who knows, even Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Aaram Haram Hai” slogan may soon be evoked to justify our predicament. That slogan belonged to the years immediately after Independence, when a newly independent nation had to be built. Today, the corporate world’s many Narayana Murthys have appropriated it to celebrate endless toil that inflates corporate wealth. It feels almost dystopian to argue for the importance of rest, but that is where we have arrived as a society. People are being reduced to cogs in the machine, valued only for their revenue-generating potential.
Teachers once shaped future citizens by nurturing curiosity, sensitivity, and a sense of responsibility. The work of nation-building may no longer be the urgent task it once was, but in the disappearance of free time, something equally important is ebbing away: The space for reflection, and intellectual and emotional growth. That is an immeasurable loss.
The writer is a Delhi-based teacher
People are being reduced to cogs in the machine, valued only for their revenue-generating potential. (C R Sasikumar/File) 
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