Teachers Are Quietly Quitting—Here’s Why They Don’t Come Back

Why Teachers Quit: A Korean Teacher’s Inside Look at the Burnout Crisis

I have been teaching Earth Science at the university level in Seoul for over a decade. I also have ADHD, which means I have spent years learning exactly how my nervous system responds to stress, overload, and the particular kind of exhaustion that does not go away after a weekend. So when I tell you that teacher burnout is one of the most misunderstood crises in modern education, I am not speaking from a position of detached research. I am speaking from inside the machine.

Related: evidence-based teaching guide

South Korea’s teacher attrition numbers have been climbing steadily, and the conversation happening in Korean staffrooms mirrors what teachers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia are saying: the job has changed in ways that the original contract never accounted for. The workload is not just heavier. It is a different kind of heavy. Understanding that distinction is the key to understanding why so many talented, committed educators are walking out the door.

The Numbers Behind the Feeling

Burnout is not a mood. It is a clinical syndrome recognized by the World Health Organization, characterized by three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Teachers score high on all three, consistently, across studies conducted in vastly different cultural contexts.

In South Korea, a 2023 survey by the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations found that nearly 68% of respondents reported considering leaving the profession within five years. That statistic would have seemed extreme ten years ago. Today it surprises no one in a Korean staffroom. Globally, the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) consistently finds that teachers report significantly higher workloads than they originally anticipated when entering the profession, and that this gap between expectation and reality is one of the strongest predictors of early departure (OECD, 2020).

What strikes me most about these numbers is that they are not describing people who never cared. The teachers most likely to burn out are often the ones who cared the most. Burnout is, in a cruel irony, frequently the endpoint of sustained idealism meeting an unsustainable system.

What the Job Actually Looks Like Now

When I was a student at Seoul National University, my professors described teaching as primarily an intellectual and relational enterprise. You know your subject deeply, you connect with students, you assess their understanding, and you refine your approach. That description is still technically accurate. It is also wildly incomplete.

Modern teaching, particularly at the primary and secondary levels in Korea, involves:

• Extensive administrative documentation that often duplicates itself across multiple platforms
• Responding to parent communications outside contracted hours, frequently via messaging apps like KakaoTalk
• Serving as the first point of contact for student mental health crises, often without adequate training or institutional backup
• Curriculum redesign cycles that arrive faster than any teacher can meaningfully implement them
• Performance evaluation systems that reward measurable outputs over the kind of slow, relational work that actually changes students’ lives

None of these tasks existed in the same volume or urgency twenty years ago. The job description stayed the same. The job itself did not.

For someone with ADHD, this kind of fragmented, demand-heavy environment is particularly brutal. Executive function, which governs task-switching, prioritization, and sustained attention, takes the heaviest hit. But here is what I have observed: neurotypical teachers are not doing fine under these conditions either. They are just better at hiding the strain for longer before it breaks them.

The Role of Emotional Labor Nobody Talks About

Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor — the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display — was developed to describe flight attendants and service workers (Hochschild, 1983). It describes teaching so precisely that I am still surprised it took so long for education researchers to apply it systematically.

Every teacher performs emotional labor every single day. You walk into a classroom where you might be exhausted, frustrated, or genuinely worried about a student’s home situation, and you project warmth, patience, and enthusiasm. You do this five, six, seven times a day. You do this while a parent’s angry message sits unread in your inbox. You do this while simultaneously tracking which students have submitted assignments, who needs extra support, and whether that one student in the back left corner has eaten today.

The research on emotional labor and burnout is unambiguous: when the emotional demands of a job consistently exceed the resources provided to meet them, burnout accelerates (Grandey, 2000). Teachers are structurally under-resourced for the emotional demands placed on them. This is not a personal failing. It is a design flaw.

In Korea, the cultural expectation of teacher deference — the idea that good teachers do not complain, do not set limits, and do not admit to struggling — amplifies this problem considerably. I have watched colleagues develop anxiety disorders, autoimmune conditions, and sleep disorders while insisting to anyone who asked that they were fine. The mask of professional competence is heavy, and wearing it indefinitely is not sustainable for any human nervous system.

The Administrative Avalanche

Let me be specific about administration, because the vague phrase “too much paperwork” does not capture what is actually happening.

In a typical week, a Korean middle school teacher might produce or update: attendance records in the school’s central system, individual student behavior logs, curriculum mapping documents for their department, parent contact records, differentiated learning plans for students with identified needs, self-evaluation reports for their own professional development portfolio, and safety compliance checklists for laboratory or physical education activities. Most of this documentation exists in parallel systems that do not communicate with each other, meaning the same information gets entered multiple times in multiple formats.

This is not education. This is documentation theater. And it consumes time and cognitive energy that teachers desperately need for actual teaching.

The OECD’s TALIS data shows that Korean teachers spend a larger proportion of their working hours on non-teaching tasks than the international average (OECD, 2020). When I speak with teachers at conferences, the administrative burden is almost always in the top three reasons they give for considering leaving. It is not that any single document is unreasonable. It is the cumulative weight of a system that has added accountability layer after accountability layer without ever removing the ones that stopped serving a real purpose.

When Students Become the Only Reward

Ask most teachers why they stay, and they will tell you it is the students. The moment a concept clicks for a student who has been struggling. The student who emails you years later to say that your class changed how they think. The quiet kid in the third row who writes a lab report so original that you have to read it twice.

These moments are real and they matter. They are also, increasingly, insufficient.

Motivation research distinguishes between intrinsic motivation — doing something because it is inherently meaningful — and the resource reserves required to sustain motivated behavior over time (Deci & Ryan, 2000). You can find your work deeply meaningful and still run out of the physical and psychological resources needed to do it. Meaning does not generate energy on its own. It amplifies energy when energy exists. When your reserves are depleted, meaning alone cannot refill them.

This is the trap that catches the best teachers. They care so much that they keep drawing on reserves they have already emptied, telling themselves that the next holiday break will reset everything. It rarely does. Chronic stress changes the nervous system in ways that a two-week vacation cannot reverse. By the time many teachers recognize they are genuinely burned out rather than just tired, they have been operating in deficit mode for years.

The Specific Korean Context

South Korea’s education system is globally admired for its outcomes. PISA scores, university admission rates, the sheer intensity of academic culture — these are things that get written about admiringly in international education reports. What gets written about less is the human cost of producing those outcomes.

The hagwon system — private after-school academies — means that many students arrive at school already exhausted from late-night study the previous evening. Teachers are managing classrooms full of sleep-deprived adolescents while simultaneously being evaluated on the academic outcomes those students produce. The pressure flows downward: from the Ministry of Education to school administrators to department heads to classroom teachers to students, and then often back upward in the form of parent complaints.

Teachers in Korea also navigate a specific kind of public scrutiny that has intensified sharply in recent years. High-profile incidents of teacher mistreatment by parents — including legal complaints filed against teachers for disciplining students — have created an environment in which many teachers feel that they cannot exercise professional judgment without risking personal legal exposure. The Korea Teachers and Education Workers’ Union has documented a significant increase in legal complaints filed against teachers over the past decade. This is not a background stressor. For many teachers, it is a constant, active source of anxiety that colors every interaction with students and parents.

In 2023, the suicide of a young elementary school teacher in Seoul — linked publicly to extreme harassment by a parent — sparked nationwide protests and a genuine policy conversation about teacher protection. That a tragedy of this magnitude was required to generate serious institutional attention tells you something important about how long these problems had been building without adequate response.

What Actually Helps (and What Doesn’t)

The institutional responses to teacher burnout tend to cluster around individual wellness interventions: mindfulness programs, resilience workshops, employee assistance programs. These are not useless. But offering a stressed teacher a breathing exercise while leaving the structural conditions unchanged is a bit like handing someone a bucket and telling them to be more resilient about the roof that is actively leaking on their head.

What the research and my own experience suggest actually makes a difference:

• Reduced administrative redundancy. Auditing which documentation requirements actually serve students versus which ones serve institutional liability management, and cutting the latter, would free up significant cognitive and time resources.
• Protected preparation time. Time that is genuinely protected — not nominally scheduled but routinely colonized by meetings, duty coverage, or administrative requests — for lesson planning and assessment.
• Genuine mental health support structures. Not a poster about the employee assistance program, but accessible, destigmatized psychological support that teachers can access without fear of professional consequences.
• Clear boundaries around parent communication. Institutional policies that define when and how teachers are expected to be available, and that administrators actually enforce rather than quietly abandon under parental pressure.
• Peer support that is structural, not incidental. Formal time for teachers to work together, share what is not working, and problem-solve without those conversations being interpreted as complaints.

None of these interventions are revolutionary. None of them require discovering something new about human psychology. They require institutional will to prioritize teacher sustainability as a genuine operational concern rather than a wellness add-on.

What Leaving Teaches You

I have not left teaching. But I have come close enough to understand exactly why people do. The moment I came closest was not during the hardest semester, or after the most difficult parent interaction, or even during the period when my ADHD was most poorly managed. It was during a week when I realized I had gone seven consecutive days without doing anything that made me feel like a good teacher — only things that made me feel like an adequate administrator.

That distinction matters. Teachers do not quit because they stopped loving their subject or their students. They quit because the systems around them progressively crowd out the work that made the job meaningful in the first place. They quit when the ratio of meaningful work to exhausting non-work tips past the point their individual reserves can sustain.

Every teacher who leaves takes years of experience, subject knowledge, and student relationships with them. The institutional cost of replacing an experienced teacher — in recruitment, in training, in the productivity loss while a new teacher climbs the learning curve — is substantial. Research on teacher turnover consistently estimates this cost in the tens of thousands of dollars per departure (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011). Systems that treat teacher wellbeing as a soft concern rather than an economic and educational necessity are, by any rational accounting, making a very expensive mistake.

The teachers who are still in classrooms — in Korea, and everywhere else — are not superhuman. They are people who have, so far, found enough meaning, support, or external circumstance to keep going. That is a fragile basis for a system that depends on their continued presence. The question worth asking is not why teachers are quitting. It is why we built systems that make quitting the rational choice, and whether we have the collective will to build different ones.

Last updated: 2026-03-31

References

• KEDI (n.d.). Analysis of Changes in Elementary School Teacher Burnout and Its … Korean Educational Development Institute. Link
• Wang, Y., et al. (2025). Work-related social media exposure and teacher burnout in pre-pandemic context: The mediating role of work-to-family conflict. Frontiers in Public Health. Link
• Wang, Y., et al. (2025). Work-related social media exposure and teacher burnout in pre-pandemic context: The mediating role of work-to-family conflict. Frontiers in Public Health. Link
• The Diplomat (2025). South Korea’s Education Obsession Is a National Emergency. The Diplomat. Link

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