18 - Teacher Burnout

Summary

For the teacher who suffers it, burnout is a tragedy, accompanied by intense personal pain and causing the need for immediate and often dislocating professional change. Individually, burnout is a terrible ordeal.

For the schools whose teachers and administrators suffer burnout, however, the pressing issue is this: “What is its significance for the educational enterprise?” What does burnout as a phenomenon tell us about schooling? Most important, what are its effects on the students, whom presumably the school is supposed to serve? Do good teachers and bad ones suffer from it equally, or do we know? If burnout disproportionately affects good teachers, then its impact on the school is grievous. If, on the other hand, burnout primarily characterizes teachers who are failing to help their students learn, then their departure from teaching is less to be lamented.

Is burnout new? One of our colleagues represented in this volume implied that it was when noting that it was first named and identified in 1973 and applied to health workers. If it is new, does it replace some earlier dysfunctional state? Could burnout be the late twentieth-century manifestation of the neurasthenia reportedly prevalent among middle- and upper-class American women of the late nineteenth century? What are the characteristics of the late twentieth century that seem to make this malady widespread? In short, what in our current circumstances has led teachers to identify their malaise as “burnout” and others to describe it as such?