Teacher motivation crisis: A Dialogue with Saeed Ghapanvari, Distinguished Scholar

Chahardoli:
The education system of any country, as the foundation of sustainable development, plays a vital role in determining the fate of future generations. Within this system, the teacher, as the primary and most influential agent in the classroom, is considered its beating heart; their mental well-being and professional commitment guarantee the overall effectiveness of the system. Unfortunately, in recent years, the teaching profession has faced a severe erosion of motivation and job satisfaction under the pressure of multiple factors. This situation reveals the urgent need to pay special attention to the roots of this silent crisis.

Teacher demotivation, as one of the most serious challenges facing Iran's education system, is a direct threat to teaching quality, professional commitment, and school effectiveness. The decline in motivation among teachers is not merely a consequence of individual shortcomings but the result of a set of structural, cultural, and managerial factors rooted at various levels of the educational system. Economic hardships, weak macro-level educational policies, unhealthy relationships in work environments, cultural burnout, and the conflict between personal and professional roles have created an insecure and unsupportive environment for teachers.

Ghapanvari:
A preoccupation with motivation turns it into a major crisis, such that the level of knowledge is reduced to repetitive information. Repeating the same lessons year after year, without any creative revision, is yet another cause alongside the others. Various factors, in combination, plunge education into a turbulent challenge, and the teacher, as one of the advancing units, descends from a specific role into a generality on par with the learner, mired in the lethargy of repetitive, unmotivated information. The structures of this phenomenon—where contradiction, a progressive element that could herald the advancement of knowledge each year—are all trapped in a chronic decay. The teacher must not be deprived of continuous learning while having organized leisure time, in which livelihood is one factor among many; they must, in a participatory manner with learners, steer the class toward learning and teaching. This requires appropriate knowledge acquired through constant study. Thus, all the demotivation and its causes aside, the learner's empty-handedness in encountering a scholar who turns virtue in the educational environment into a great motivating force has trapped education in a deep erosion.

Chahardoli:
Continuing your discussion, one could say: The persistence of this motivational erosion not only disrupts the educational function of schools but also leads to the reproduction of a vicious cycle of superficial teaching, passive learning, and a disconnect between the school and the real transformations of society. When a teacher is deprived of institutional support, livelihood security, and genuine opportunities for professional growth, their pedagogical action is inevitably reduced to minimal, formalistic gestures, and the classroom degenerates from a living space for critical thinking and creative dialogue into a site for the lifeless transmission of data. Therefore, confronting the crisis of teacher demotivation requires looking beyond temporary, individual-centered solutions and necessitates a deep rethinking of educational policies, the social status of teachers, mechanisms for professional participation, and the connection between knowledge, virtue, and the educational lifeworld. Only in the light of this can education be rescued from chronic erosion and transformed into a productive force for social change.

Ghapanvari:
Education must shed its skin every few years, and it must do so with the participation of the teachers within the field, not from outside it. Thought, in its process of growth, sheds its skin every few years, paving the way for transcendence by opening new windows to fresh thinking. Thus, change in the content and core plays a crucial role in elimination and reform. This imperative steers us from an impotent and sluggish cycle toward a powerful and swift leap. Perhaps one of the gateways to this process is not relying solely on conventional textbooks at each educational level. Creating motivation for reading and introducing parallel texts outside the conventional sphere is a powerful impulse for producing critical thought. If we only prioritize and foreground clichés, we will produce nothing but a sick and paralyzed product—namely, the learner's mindset. Ceasing to reproduce defective cycles by incorporating updated reflections will bring about the elevation of education in its entirety.

Chahardoli:
I can summarize our discussion as follows: The foundation of sustainable development in any educational system is centered on the efficacy of the teaching body, whose mental well-being and professional commitment determine systemic efficiency. However, in recent years, due to structural, economic, and managerial pressures, the teaching profession has been colonized by a severe erosion of job motivation, which constitutes an essential threat to the quality of the teaching-learning process. This decline in motivation is caused by a set of deep-rooted factors that reduce the teacher's pedagogical action to minimal formalities and degrade knowledge into repetitive information and a lack of critical thinking, leading to the reproduction of a vicious cycle of superficial education and the school's disconnection from the realities of the lifeworld. Therefore, emerging from this chronic crisis requires a fundamental rethinking of macro-level educational policies, securing teachers' livelihoods, and designing mechanisms for the shedding of old content and cognitive frameworks with the active participation of teachers themselves, so that education may break out of a passive state and become a productive force for the elevation of thought.