Burnout, Cynicism, or Theatre — Pick Your Poison

"It is written in so much bold letter that even blind can see."

That was my introduction to my new English teacher. She was standing at the entrance of the government school where I would spend my final years of schooling. First day. First impression.

I don't tell that story to mock her.

I tell it because she is the system made visible. Somewhere between her first day in a classroom and the day I met her, something had left. The enthusiasm, the craft, the sense of purpose — gone. What remained was a woman showing up because showing up was what you did.

I have thought about her a lot since.

Teaching was once a first-choice profession. People chose it. Today, for the most part, it chooses people who couldn't find something else, or it loses the ones who could.

I live in Chandigarh — a city designed so that every sector is self-sufficient. There is a government school two hundred metres from my gate. My daughter takes a bus five kilometres to my old school instead. That tells you everything about what the government school system communicates to parents, without saying a word.

The burden of that failure lands squarely on private schools. But here is what rarely gets said out loud: private school teachers are not in a better situation. In many cases they are in a worse one. Government teachers, for all the system's failures, have pay commissions, job security, and defined working conditions. Private school teachers have none of that. They are paid less, often significantly less, and asked to do considerably more.

The numbers bear it out: 70% of teachers in India report emotional exhaustion. 65% report reduced sense of personal achievement. There is a shortage of 1.5 million teachers nationally. These are not symptoms of a staffing problem. They are symptoms of a profession that has been systematically hollowed out.

So what happens to the people inside it?

Some burn out quietly. They keep showing up, keep delivering lessons, but the light behind it dims. They are present in body, somewhere else in mind. You have seen this teacher. You may have had this teacher.

Recently, one of the better teachers in my daughter's school left — to follow her passion for candle making. Which is a perfectly fine thing to do, except that what it really means is that candle making rewards her more than a classroom did.

When a good teacher finds more dignity in a side hustle than in the profession, that is not a personal choice. That is a system telling you exactly what it thinks of the people inside it.

Some turn cynical. They do the job with practiced detachment. They know the system is broken, have made their peace with it, and have quietly decided that heroism is not in their contract. They are not wrong, exactly. They are just done.

And some perform. They run the activities, file the reports, tick the competency boxes, smile at the parent-teacher meetings. Everything looks like education from the outside.

I have sat in rooms where snake oil was being sold — hell, I made the snake oil to sell. Programs promising transformation, mapped to government annexures, packaged for compliance portals, complete with a gamified app for good measure. Twenty-five hours of workshops dressed up as professional development.

The principals in those rooms already knew the punchline: the moment you train them, they leave. The workshops don't fix that. They just give everyone something to point to.

Burnout. Cynicism. Theatre.

These are not personality flaws. They are rational responses to an irrational system. When the job asks for everything and offers back very little — in pay, in recognition, in actual support — people adapt the only way they can. They protect what's left of themselves.

Which brings me back to the woman at the gate.

I do not know what she was like on her first day. I do not know at what point the system wore her down to that version of herself. But I know she did not start there. Nobody starts there.

The question NEP 2020 does not answer, and does not seem to be asking, is this: what are you doing to stop making more of her?

Next up: CBSE's competency framework looks impressive on paper. In practice, it's a farmer in a costume explaining photosynthesis. The boards are complicit — and here's how.