This article considers time as an important way that educational policy functions in terms of the ways that it constructs the work of educators. The article describes how standardised materials and other technological advancements are used in the labour politics of education to simplify, and eventually undermine the value of educational work. This is advanced as a particular development in the historical, political, and economic relationship between the public, schoolteachers, and the State within these late stages of a neoliberal consensus. By conceiving of time in three discrete modes, this article considers ways that educational policy can be understood as changing the socially necessary labour time of educational work and constraining its critical potential through a functionally infinite magic time. This article uses as an example policy changes underway in Nunavut, Canada which are intended to expedite the implementation of Inuktitut as the language of instruction in all public schools.