PRIMARY AND CONTEXTUAL FACTORS OF TEACHER MALAISE IN THE MUNICIPAL EDUCATION SYSTEM OF RIO DAS OSTRAS

Abstract

This article analyzes the factors that constitute teacher malaise in the context of productive restructuring and neoliberal hegemony, taking as its empirical locus the municipal education system of Rio das Ostras (RJ). This qualitative research is part of the broader project developed by the Laboratory of Investigation on State, Power, and Education (LIEPE) and mobilizes as primary sources the 2024 School Census and the Teacher Survey, an online questionnaire that gathered 1,370 responses across the state of Rio de Janeiro, 71 of which correspond to the municipality under study. Grounded in a Marxist perspective and in dialogue with authors such as Esteve, Frigotto, Miranda, Dardot and Laval, Han, and Safatle, the research seeks to understand how the primary and contextual factors of teacher malaise are linked to the structural transformations of work in contemporary capitalism. The findings reveal that teaching has been undergoing a process of proto-real subsumption, which reconfigures its nature by reducing pedagogical autonomy, intensifying labor demands, and fostering the de-intellectualization of the profession. At the level of contextual factors, notable elements include the degradation of the teacher’s social image, the veiled precarization of the career, and the emergence of a “new type of teacher,” shaped according to the logic of the neoliberal subject. At the level of primary factors, the precariousness of working conditions, functional overload, and the psychic distress arising from the intensification of daily demands stand out, frequently exacerbated by practices of institutionalized moral harassment that consolidate as management devices. The article concludes that teacher malaise should not be understood as an individual phenomenon, but rather as a structural expression of neoliberal rationality that commodifies education, shifts responsibility for school failure onto teachers, and administrates suffering as a mechanism of governance. In this sense, it reaffirms the need to denaturalize teacher illness and to approach it as a collective issue, intrinsically linked to class struggle and the dispute over the social function of the school.

Keywords: Teacher malaise; Neoliberalism; Teachers’ work