The Complex Relationship Between Teachers and State Expectations

Every classroom has a teacher at its centre – someone trained to explain, question, inspire, and guide. But in many parts of the world, the teacher’s role has quietly expanded far beyond the classroom. Governments increasingly treat teachers as reliable, deployable agents of the state: available to conduct surveys, update voter rolls, distribute government materials, and implement policy directives. This pattern raises a fundamental question about how the state views the teaching profession – and whether teachers are recognized as autonomous professionals or functioning as extensions of governmental machinery.

The idea of the teacher as a state apparatus
From theory to practice: teachers as government functionaries
What the law says – and what actually happens
The human cost: what teachers lose
Critiquing the state apparatus model
Reclaiming professional identity and autonomy
Why this matters for education quality

The idea of the teacher as a state apparatus

The concept of teachers as instruments of the state draws significantly from the work of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In his influential 1970 essay, Althusser distinguished between two types of state power: the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) – institutions like the police, military, and courts that maintain order through force – and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which operates through ideas, values, and beliefs rather than coercion.

According to Althusser, the educational system is one of the most powerful ISAs in a modern capitalist society. Schools, in his view, assume a dominant role by concealing the ideology of the ruling class behind the seemingly neutral and liberating qualities of education, making the broader agenda largely invisible to teachers, students, and parents alike. The school, he argued, had replaced the church as the central institution for transmitting the values and norms necessary to reproduce existing social relations.

For Althusser, teachers function as part of this apparatus – transmitting a general ideology that presents the existing social order as natural and reasonable, and preparing students to passively accept their future roles in the economy and society. This is not always a conscious act. Many teachers work with genuine dedication, believing they are serving their students’ best interests. But the structural conditions in which they operate shape what they teach, how they teach it, and ultimately, whose interests education serves.

From theory to practice: teachers as government functionaries

While Althusser’s critique operates at the level of ideology and curriculum, the state’s influence on teachers also takes a much more direct and visible form – through the assignment of non-educational duties. In India, this issue has become a point of serious national debate.

Government school teachers across Indian states are increasingly deployed as a de-facto bureaucratic workforce, performing duties that include caste surveys, door-to-door data collection, election booth management, vaccination drives, mid-day meal supervision, and tree plantation campaigns – all on top of their regular classroom responsibilities. According to Karnataka government data, of 365 days in the 2025-26 academic year, 123 are holidays. During the remaining 242 working days, teachers must also monitor the execution of multiple government schemes, leaving little uninterrupted time for actual teaching.

A report by Education for All in India identified elections, census work, government surveys, maintaining student records, ordering supplies, and student supervision as some of the non-teaching activities regularly assigned to teachers. According to available data, teachers are required to undertake around 15 non-teaching tasks every month, in addition to their regular teaching responsibilities.

The range of these duties can border on the absurd. In Maharashtra’s legislature, a legislator raised the issue of teachers being assigned to count stray dogs, calling it a profound insult to the profession in a state that reveres educators as ‘Acharya’. He also cited an instance where 45 out of 60 teachers in a single school were drafted for election duties, leaving only 15 teachers to manage 2,000 students.

What the law says – and what actually happens

India’s legal framework does acknowledge the problem. Section 27 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, bans all non-academic work by teachers except for three specific activities: election duties, the decennial census, and disaster relief tasks. The Supreme Court of India has also directed the government not to deploy teachers in non-teaching assignments beyond these exceptions.

However, the gap between legislation and practice remains wide. Legal experts have called the prolonged deployment of government teachers for administrative work a blatant and systemic violation of the RTE Act, especially when duties are stretched to include processes that do not fall under the permitted categories. While census work occurs once a decade and disasters are relatively rare, increasingly frequent elections continue to keep teachers away from schools for extended periods, particularly for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.

Even within the legally permitted exceptions, the burden is significant. Teachers serving as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) during elections must attend multiple official meetings, compile voter lists, and verify household data – tasks that bleed into school hours and personal time alike. Parents in Maharashtra even moved the Bombay High Court, arguing that deploying nearly 2,000 education department employees, mostly teachers, as election officers violated their children’s right to education.

The human cost: what teachers lose

The impact of this dual burden is not merely logistical – it is deeply personal and professional. Teachers with postgraduate qualifications are sent out on data collection drives and castigated when their students underperform – a cruel irony, since their absence from the classroom directly contributes to poor learning outcomes. The psychological toll is significant. Teachers describe frustration, loss of professional identity, and growing disconnection from the very students they joined the profession to serve.

A primary school teacher from one affected state captured the mood plainly: “In some places, teachers even have to ride their bikes to fetch rice for mid-day meals. How is this our job? Are we here to teach or to manage all these tasks?”

The problem is compounded in under-resourced schools with inadequate staff. When a few teachers from an already stretched school are diverted for weeks of election or survey duty, entire subjects go untaught. In one school, six staff members – including mathematics and physics teachers – were deployed for administrative duties weeks before board examinations, leaving students to manage entirely on their own.

Critiquing the state apparatus model

It is important to note that Althusser’s framework is not without its critics. Henry Giroux, among others, argues that the theory is overly deterministic – working-class pupils are not entirely moulded by the system, and education can and does challenge the dominant order. Many university-educated individuals become the very critics of the systems that educated them. Teachers, too, are not passive instruments. They make choices, advocate for students, challenge curricula, and push back against administrative overreach.

Yet the structural critique retains its relevance. Even if individual teachers resist, the system continues to place them in roles that subordinate their professional judgment to administrative priorities. The state uses educational institutions as a soft space through which it constantly reproduces its authority, shapes citizen identity, and brings individuals under its ideological and administrative influence – sometimes through the content of education, and sometimes through the labour of educators themselves.

A historical study of teachers in 18th-century Portugal similarly found that educators functioned as apparatchiks of the state – either willingly or unknowingly serving to achieve the ideological objectives of the ruling regime. This is not a uniquely modern or uniquely Indian problem. It is a pattern that emerges wherever the state lacks sufficient administrative infrastructure and turns to its most widely distributed resource: teachers.

Reclaiming professional identity and autonomy

The antidote to treating teachers as state functionaries lies in recognizing and protecting their professional status. Internationally, this case has been made clearly. The ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers (1966) states plainly that teaching should be regarded as a profession – a form of public service that requires expert knowledge and specialized skills, acquired and maintained through rigorous and continuing study. It further insists that the proper status of teachers, and due public regard for the profession, are of major importance for the full realization of educational aims and objectives.

These international instruments set out principles covering teachers’ rights and responsibilities, standards for preparation and employment, and numerous recommendations for teachers’ meaningful participation in educational decisions through consultation and negotiation with educational authorities. The vision they articulate is one of teachers as partners in education policy – not as instruments of administrative convenience.

Closer to home, some Indian states and teachers’ associations have begun to push back constructively. Leaders of teachers’ associations have proposed that five days a week be exclusively reserved for teaching, with one day designated specifically for non-teaching responsibilities. Maharashtra’s government has signalled that it is considering designating one Saturday a month for administrative tasks and exploring whether reporting duties can be shifted to facilitation centres rather than schools. These are small but meaningful steps toward protecting classroom time.

Why this matters for education quality

At its core, this issue is not just about teacher welfare – it is about student outcomes. When teachers are consistently pulled away from classrooms to serve administrative functions, the foundational purpose of schooling is undermined. Government schools already operate under pressure from large class sizes, limited resources, and socioeconomic challenges that private schools rarely face. Heaping administrative burdens onto their teachers makes quality public education structurally harder to deliver.

Returning dignity to the profession of teaching means respecting teachers’ time, honouring their expertise, and enabling them to do what they were trained to do – teach. Moving from a model that treats teachers as a limitless supply of human capital for government use, to one that genuinely protects and invests in their professional role, is not just a matter of fairness. It is a prerequisite for any serious commitment to quality education.

This requires not only legal enforcement of protections like Section 27 of the RTE Act, but a broader cultural shift in how governments, administrators, and communities perceive the teacher’s role. A teacher is not a government clerk with a chalkboard. A teacher is a professional whose primary and irreplaceable obligation is to the students in front of them.

What do you think? Should governments be held to stricter account for deploying teachers in non-educational roles, even when national tasks like elections or surveys are involved? And how can the teaching profession itself better advocate for the kind of professional recognition and autonomy that international standards say it deserves?

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Table of Contents

The idea of the teacher as a state apparatus 🔗

From theory to practice: teachers as government functionaries 🔗

What the law says – and what actually happens 🔗

The human cost: what teachers lose 🔗

Critiquing the state apparatus model 🔗

Reclaiming professional identity and autonomy 🔗

Why this matters for education quality 🔗