The workplace site of teachers and institutionalized learning offer a paradigmatic example of how we might use the philosophy of Alain Badiou to examine crucial distinctions between toil (or in his terminology, a "perseverance in being") and the work that is, as his philosophy and ethics seek to support, necessary to "becoming subject" to our learning and lives. With this distinction, Badiou attempts to philosophize an "outside" to inherited opinions about the purpose and point of our labors. In this regard, I set Badiou's key concepts as a resonate call to the work of Ivan Illich's classic, Deschooling Society (1971), and Rebecca Solnit's (2009) recent work examining what happens when the disaster of everyday life is ripped apart by an "event" that creates the possibility of new possibilities in which the work of a becoming subject begins (Solnit: "A Paradise Built in Hell").