Teachers must drown out the bureaucracy and listen to the voices of students, writes Stephen Kemmis.

The task for teachers is always to educate their students, not just to give them schooling. By schooling, I mean the functional apparatus of schools, textbooks, lesson plans, units of work, assessment. Education is more than that. It is what changes lives. The teacher's job is changing lives. The job of changing lives is not bounded by the walls of the classroom, or the fences of the school. It is not limited to the lives of the students who pass through classes. What students learn has effects that cascade down through their lives and out into the lives of their families, their communities,...