Caught in a Landslide: Moral Injury and the Collapse of Teaching

In 1975, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” stunned listeners with its refusal to follow any conventional structure. The song lurches from soft piano ballad to operatic absurdity to anguished rock anthem, never settling into a single form or offering resolution. Its enduring power lies in that disorientation.

Originally coined in military and medical contexts, moral injury describes the experience of being compelled to act in ways that betray one’s ethical commitments. For teachers, it might mean enforcing policies that silence students, ignoring their own professional judgment or standing by as inequities worsen—all while knowing better. Over time, what begins as a pang of discomfort becomes a sustained erosion of self.

Most teachers do not enter the profession to become enforcers of policy. They come to build relationships, nurture civic responsibility and foster critical thinking. But the system they enter often rewards something else entirely: compliance over curiosity, surveillance over trust, technical efficiency over moral engagement. Teachers must navigate overcrowded classrooms, punitive accountability structures, and legislation that constricts both curriculum and conscience.

The COVID-19 pandemic briefly disrupted that rhythm. At the height of school closures, educators were hailed as heroes. They scrambled to create virtual classrooms and emergency lesson plans, often while tending to their own families and fears. For a moment, the dissonance faded. The public saw the improvisational labor that teaching had always required.

But the recognition was short-lived. When schools reopened, many teachers returned not to relief, but to intensified strain: larger rosters, deeper student trauma, reduced planning time and an increasingly volatile political climate. They were praised for their care, yet punished when that care conflicted with policy. They were asked to foster democratic values while being told which truths were off-limits. In many states, new laws now dictate how teachers may speak—if at all—about race, gender, inequality and history, precisely the subjects most relevant to students’ lives. The contradiction is stark: Cultivate critical thinking, but censor critical content. Model empathy, but ignore injustice. Care, but only within the boundaries of obedience.

Over time, these contradictions wear down not only a teacher’s spirit but their sense of self. As “Bohemian Rhapsody” demands in its operatic crescendo—“So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye”—many teachers reach a breaking point. What begins as disillusionment becomes rupture, and what starts as exhaustion corrodes into ethical collapse.

And so they leave. Not out of indifference, but as an act of self-preservation and moral survival. They are not walking away from students but from a system that demands silence when they are called to speak, obedience when they are trained to question, and endurance in the face of sustained injustice.

And what remains after they go?

Visit the empty classroom. The whiteboard still bears yesterday’s date. A stack of ungraded papers curls at the corners. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. The room is vacant, but the purpose that once animated it has faded beyond recognition.

We cannot talk about teacher retention without talking about moral injury. We cannot address what is often described as a teacher shortage without confronting the policy decisions and institutional habits that are driving good educators out. Teachers aren’t leaving because they lack resilience—they’re leaving because they’re being asked to participate in a version of education that violates the very commitments that brought them to the work.

If we frame this crisis as a matter of compensation or workload alone, we obscure the more unsettling truth that teaching, once understood as a calling, has been reduced to a role governed by constraint and control. Addressing this crisis requires more than recruitment strategies or surface-level incentives. It calls for structural repair through the restoration of autonomy, the renewal of trust, and the creation of conditions in which care is not seen as a private act of sacrifice, but as the public foundation of democratic life.

The question is not simply whether we can recruit more teachers. It’s whether we can rebuild a profession worth staying in, and whether our education system still believes in the civic mission it claims to uphold.

And that is the real emergency—not a shortage of teachers, not a lack of will, but a collapse of purpose. A crisis not of endurance, but of trust. And without trust, there is no democracy. Only performance.

At the end of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the music softens. The lyrics fade into resignation: “Nothing really matters to me.” It would be easy to hear apathy in that final note. But listen again. What you hear is grief—the voice of someone who once cared deeply, who gave everything they had, who believed too much, for too long, in a system that forgot how to believe in itself.