Maslow's Hierarchy Misses the Point for Healing Teacher Burnout

This post is a modified excerpt of Chapter 6 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway

Schools are reflections of the society that designs them.” - Dr. Bryan A. Brown

What’s the Point?

The Maslow’s hierarchy that educators know by heart over-simplifies and misrepresents Maslow’s work.

Despite all of the reasons it shouldn’t have been, however, the version of Maslow’s hierarchy that we know and are instructed to love (that was designed by a business strategist)—is the model photocopied into our welcome-back binders and professional development packets. Though the flaws in the model’s creation are well documented and righteous critique continues, Maslow’s hierarchy persists.

Having reserved some space and grace for Maslow by acknowledging that we may be working with a bastardization of his work, we also need to put his work into context. The model for which Maslow is so famous fails to acknowledge the Native origins of Maslow’s hierarchy, particularly his time spent with the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in 1938, how Native worldviews shaped Maslow’s thinking (though they weren’t properly credited, understood, nor represented in ye olde model), and how current Native scholars are supporting a richer understanding of the Siksika model today. We’ll return to these essential ideas later in this chapter.

To remind you why you love teaching and support you to love teaching and yourself in an ongoing fashion, let’s name the two most harmful problems built into Maslow’s hierarchy. One problem is the way it assumes a linear progression in which one’s basic physiological needs must be met in linear time before one can access connection, let alone meaning. Another flaw is that the striped triangle doesn’t indicate what we’re supposed to use our fancy fulfilled talents and potentialities for.

It’s Possible to Need—And Access—Multiple Things at Once

Please take care of your basic needs, of course. When and how ever you can.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that extreme self-care follows a linear progression in which the more basic must be completed before the more complex is begun.

Unfortunately, inevitably, as is the nature of teacher burnout, there will be days when you’re exhausted, you feel unsafe, and your relationships feel fragile. If it were up to Maslow’s hierarchy, you’d be screwed—you’d be denied access to any sense of higher purpose to pull you through. Thankfully, contrary to the way the triangle presents accessing components of self-actualization through time as if we were earning badges, you always have access to your own sense of meaning, which may be exactly what gets you through on some days.

If we have to wait to feel loved, connected, financially secure, and well fed before we are

allowed to access our sense of purpose? Might as well not get out of bed.

If humans require full bellies before they deserve access to connection and creativity, then Maslow’s hierarchy into a gatekeeping device. When we believe that basic need satisfaction must precede meaning-making, we allow institutional oppression to masquerade as helpful caring.

We see evidence of this all of the time; students in highly impacted schools are forced into

achingly boring drill-and-kill math and language arts programs while rich White schools get coding classes and dance programs. The justification? Basic needs before fun. This application is both a perversion of what we know about the learning sciences as well as a perversion of the already misrepresented ideas in Maslow’s hierarchy.

A major component of extreme self-care is the acknowledgment that you are a part of a system and that your participation impacts that system. Suppose you are willing to martyr yourself to a spartan regime in which you’ll meet only your basic physiological needs during the school year, and you’ll wait for summer to have fun, be curious, nurture relationships, and

fully inhabit your humanity. In that case, you’re much more likely to do the same to your students.

Go ahead and peek back at your values—I would be shocked if all three are about spartan denial, individualistic austerity, or individualistic intellectualism. The structure of this book placed your values exploration in an earlier chapter (Chapter 5) and doesn’t acknowledge deep care for your physical self until a later chapter (Chapter 10). This is intentional.

Consider the leaders you admire most; if Nelson Mandela, for example, needed three meals a day before he could connect to his purpose, not only would we not know his name, but South Africa’s sanctioned apartheid may have continued as it was, unchecked.

(For concrete exercises to enact strategic self-care, see Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway)