Celebrating Teacher’s Day is a meaningful gesture, but it also exposes a sad truth: teachers today are overworked and underappreciated. While society praises their role in shaping the youth, the system continues to burden them with tasks that strip them of the time and energy needed to teach. Recognition, therefore, must go beyond words—it must confront the conditions that cripple their vocation.
Teachers are meant to be mentors and educators, not clerks and event organizers. Yet under the Department of Education, many find themselves buried in paperwork, data collection, and endless compliance reports that have little to do with instruction. They must attend meetings, join committees, and handle school celebrations—all for “school improvement” but at the cost of actual learning. When teaching becomes secondary to bureaucracy, classrooms suffer. Lessons lose depth, and students are left behind, unable to read with understanding or perform basic computations.
The situation reveals not a failure of teachers but a failure of the system that governs them. Teachers did not choose to abandon their teaching hours; they were compelled by a structure that values documentation over education. The endless cycle of reports has turned teachers into functionaries of an inefficient bureaucracy, reducing their noble profession into a daily struggle for compliance. This misplaced priority betrays the very mission of education—to develop minds, not to fill folders. The decline in students’ performance in national assessments and the growing reports of functional illiteracy among learners speak volumes about this institutional neglect.
Celebrating Teacher’s Day, therefore, must be more than ceremonial. It must serve as a national reckoning—a reminder that teachers are the pillars of the country’s future, yet they stand weakened by the weight of unnecessary work. To continue lauding them with flowers and speeches while ignoring their plight is hypocrisy. True honor demands reform. It requires that society acknowledge how much has been taken from teachers in the name of compliance and how much time has been stolen from the classroom by bureaucracy masquerading as accountability.
The most fitting tribute to teachers is not a token celebration but liberation from the piles of paperwork and redundant reports that waste their intellect and passion. Their time must be restored to teaching, their purpose reclaimed, and their dignity upheld. The Department of Education must look hard at its policies and realign priorities: let teachers teach and administrators administer. Only then can Teacher’s Day become a celebration that truly means something—not just to teachers, but to the students whose minds and futures they shape.
