When Care Must Be Performed: On Discontent, Dignity, and the Cost of Being Heard

“Kids matter. Teachers care.”

This should not be a controversial statement. It should not require a public campaign, advertising dollars, or carefully calibrated messaging to be taken seriously. And yet, here we are.

The BC Teachers’ Federation’s current campaign places children at the centre and names what educators already know to be true: meaningful learning requires time, staffing, and resources. Teachers cannot support students in a system that is stretched past its breaking point. This is not radical. It is responsible.

And still, the message must be performed.

The performance is not the problem

The performance is the requirement.

Teachers are not engaging in performative discontent because they lack sincerity or conviction. They are doing so because the system demands it. Care must be made visible. Harm must be softened. Discontent must be translated into language that is publicly palatable before it is allowed into political conversation.

Educators cannot simply say, these conditions are untenable.
They must say, kids matter.
They must prove that they care before they are permitted to ask for what care requires.

This is not a failure of advocacy. It is a structural constraint.

When care becomes a credential

In BC, teacher working conditions are still treated as a labour issue first and a student rights issue second. or not at all. As a result, educators are forced into a familiar rhetorical bind. Any demand for fair compensation, reasonable workload, or sustainable staffing must be framed through student impact to be considered legitimate.

This creates a quiet but corrosive dynamic. Care becomes a credential. Discontent must be moralized. Teachers are expected to demonstrate devotion before they are allowed to name harm.

The BCTF campaign does this skillfully and strategically. But it also reveals something deeper about how power operates in public education. The system is far more comfortable acknowledging care than resourcing it.

Performative discontent as a systemic response

Performative discontent does not live in the campaign itself. It lives in what happens next.

When governments publicly acknowledge teacher concern, express shared values, and affirm that kids matter while maintaining the same funding formulas, staffing shortages, and accountability gaps, discontent becomes trapped in performance.

It is seen.
It is heard.
It is thanked.
And then it is neutralized.

This is how systems absorb critique without changing their conditions.

Teachers continue to work longer hours. Inclusion continues to rely on underqualified and underpaid support staff. Classroom complexity increases while preparation time shrinks. Students with the greatest needs are still the least consistently supported.

The words circulate. The conditions remain.

The cost of being heard

There is a human cost to this dynamic. Requiring educators to repeatedly justify their care in order to ask for structural support erodes dignity. It shifts responsibility downward and obscures the government's obligation to design a system that works.

Care is not a renewable resource. It is sustained or depleted by conditions. When those conditions are ignored, care becomes something teachers are expected to supply endlessly, even as the system withdraws the supports that make it possible. This is how compassion fatigue takes root, not as a personal failing, but as a predictable outcome of being asked to carry responsibility without the resources to meet it.

The fact that educators must rely on collective bargaining to secure the basic conditions required for inclusion reveals a deeper failure. Access to education, meaningful support, and dignity at school are not labour perks. They are human rights. When those rights are treated as negotiable, deferred to contracts and budget cycles, responsibility quietly shifts away from the government and onto educators to fight for what should already be guaranteed.

This is not sustainable. And it is not ethical.

Beyond performance, toward responsibility

“Kids matter. Teachers care.”
The campaign is right.

But care cannot remain a message. It must become a condition.

A supportive school system is not built on goodwill alone. It is built through material investment, enforceable standards, and structural accountability. It is built by ensuring teachers have the time to plan, the staffing to collaborate, and the resources to respond to the real students in front of them.

Until then, discontent will continue to be performed, not because educators are unwilling to act, but because the system has made performance the only language it responds to.

If kids truly matter, and teachers truly care, then the next step is not another campaign.
It is action that changes the conditions in which care can exist.