Teaching can offer meaning, dignity and a profound sense of responsibility to others. But devotion to the work should never become an excuse for poor pay, insecurity or burnout.

Victorian teachers are currently voting on a new pay offer from the state government ahead of a planned 24-hour strike on 19 August. The dispute focuses on salaries, workloads and enterprise bargaining. But it also raises a deeper question. Why do so many people remain in a profession that is so demanding and poorly paid?

A few weeks ago, I watched a Facebook video of one of my favourite teachers retiring after working for more than four decades at the same school. The four-minute clip shows him walking through what seems like an endless guard of honour formed by students and staff. As I watched the clip, I was struck by the way my former teacher sought eye contact with everyone he passed, making each person feel as though they alone mattered. Decades earlier, he had made me feel the same way.

It is almost a cliché to say that teachers inspire the next generation. Yet if people really believed this, teachers would enjoy far greater status and financial reward. This is plainly not the case. The base salary for a secondary teacher in Victoria is $79,589, well under the Australian average yearly wage of $106,657. At universities in Victoria, things are much worse. Between 50 and 80 per cent of undergraduate teaching at Australian universities is undertaken by casual or sessional academics. I am one of them. I can tell you that the low pay and job insecurity are very real.

So why do people continue to work as teachers despite this reality?

The idea that work is fundamental to human flourishing is nothing new. Freud maintained that love and work are central to psychological health. Marx went further, arguing that meaningful work expresses something fundamental about our ‘species-being’, our ability to be creative human beings who can shape the world around us. When this ability is compromised and work becomes monotonous, poorly paid and insecure, the human spirit is diminished with it.

Teaching makes this especially visible. Its deepest rewards come not from salary or status but from helping students become more confident, intellectually curious and capable of seeing the world differently. In this way, teaching helps to shape the world through inspiring the next generation with novel and transformative ideas.

Last year I was asked to give a talk at a prominent Melbourne grammar school. When I asked the senior chaplain why he had devoted his life to education, he replied:

“I was called.”

I was surprised and fascinated by his answer. The language was exotic and seemed to belong to another age. Today we speak of people’s careers, their ambitions and personal journeys, but rarely of callings.

The Protestant understanding of work as a calling may sound archaic today, but this tradition has an even longer history. The Bible gives us some prime examples in Moses and Jonah, who are presented with a calling that they initially reject. When Moses encounters God in the burning bush, he is amazed but at the same time reluctant to take on the responsibility he is presented with. He says to Yahweh, “Please send someone else.” Jonah makes an even greater effort to escape his calling, famously fleeing in a boat and then spending a long weekend in the belly of a giant fish. In both cases, the responsibility of a calling is something that is initially rejected and then taken on only when a radical change of mind – metanoia – takes place.

In a culture that encourages us to view every relationship through the lens of power and oppression, the idea of a calling can seem misguided. From this perspective, those who devote themselves to teaching or volunteering may appear to be participating willingly in their own exploitation, to be living in a state of what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’.

Yet I would suggest that following a calling is not false consciousness. It is a deepening of consciousness. It determines what we do; it determines what we notice.

A calling is what drives a teacher to notice the anxious student at the back of the classroom and to make them feel at ease. It helps them to recognise a growing confidence in a previously reticent student and to gently invite them into the discussion. In this way our attention determines our responsibilities, and over time these habits shape our consciousness. The more we attend to those around us, the more our responsibility and sense of a calling deepen. This is why a calling is so powerful.

From this perspective, the current teachers’ dispute in Victoria is about more than pay and conditions. As one Victorian teacher put it, “Students need to learn in environments where their staff aren’t stressed out, burned out, and leaving before retirement age.” Those who believe deeply in their work are particularly vulnerable to exploitation because they will often give more than any contract requires. But fair pay and a sense of calling are not opposed. Good conditions help create the space in which teachers can devote the attention that drew many of them to the profession in the first place.

In a culture that regularly lists the wealthiest and most powerful Australians, success is presented in a very particular way. Watching my former teacher walk through that seemingly endless guard of honour, I realised that little had changed since I sat in his classroom decades earlier. Dressed in jogging shorts and sporting a three-day growth, he was hardly an image of worldly success. Yet he possessed a dignity that everyone present seemed to recognise. It had not come from wealth, status or prestige, but from 44 years of faithfully responding to a calling that had shaped the person he had become.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.