What’s been gained and what’s been lost: a look back at the fierceness of pedagogues from times long goneAbstract
The evolution of educational practices from the emotionally erratic and didactically discourteous methods of the past to the more emotionally controlled and politically correct approaches of today is examined. Through personal anecdotes and a historical analysis, I highlight how the corresponding shifts in societal norms have influenced the classroom environment. The discussion raises critical questions about the implications of these historical changes on student adaptability, resilience and cognitive development. The tradeoff between fostering inclusivity, which seeks to create safe and supportive spaces for all students, and maintaining emotional authenticity, which allows for raw, unfiltered expressions of thought and emotion that can challenge comfort zones but inspire growth, is emphasized. By reflecting on the pros and cons entailing these evolving practices, I call for a balanced approach that honors both individual authenticity and communal harmony in shaping the next generation of effective and equitable educational policies.
Keywords
Evolution of educational practices; emotional authenticity and regulation; inclusivity; classroom environment; cognitive development
Resumo
Analisa-se a evolução das práticas educacionais dos métodos emocionalmente erráticos e didaticamente descorteses do passado para as abordagens mais controladas emocionalmente e politicamente corretas de hoje. Por meio de relatos pessoais e uma análise histórica, ressalta-se como as respectivas mudanças nas normas sociais influenciaram o ambiente da sala de aula. A discussão levanta questões críticas sobre as implicações dessas mudanças históricas na adaptabilidade, resiliência e desenvolvimento cognitivo dos alunos. Enfatiza-se a troca entre a promoção da inclusividade – que busca criar espaços seguros e acolhedores para todos os alunos – e a manutenção da autenticidade emocional – que permite a expressão crua e sem filtros de pensamentos e emoções que podem desafiar zonas de conforto mas inspiram o crescimento. Ao refletir sobre os prós e contras envolvidos nessas práticas em evolução, argumenta-se em prol de uma abordagem equilibrada que honre tanto a autenticidade individual quanto a harmonia comunitária na orientação da próxima geração de políticas educacionais eficazes e equitativas.
Palavras-chave
Evolução das práticas educacionais; autenticidade emocional e regulação; inclusão; ambiente de sala de aula; desenvolvimento cognitivo
Introduction
Boundaries distinguishing appropriateness from unacceptability have continuously changed throughout the history of human civilization, including those dormant in the domain of education. Pedagogic methods based on corporal punishments, for example, practiced since antiquity (Wheeler et al., 2013), once used to be deemed not only acceptable, but also necessary to implement lest the quality of education be compromised (Middleton, 2008; Dubanoski et al., 1983; Wasef, 2011). They were justified by a number of disputable or outright erroneous beliefs, including the ideas that pain assists memory, that fear is the basis of wisdom, and that periodic punishments build working habits, mental discipline and morality (Parsons, 2015). After corporal punishments reached their peak in the western world in the 16th century, the period during which schools were known as literal “places of execution” (Ariès, 1962), their use began to be questioned by the philosophers of the Enlightenment period, including Locke (1693), who replaced the notion of the original sin with that of tabula rasa and deduced from there on that every form of punishment used to educate children must be a form of tyranny, and Rousseau (2013), who demanded that all forms of physical punishment imposed on children be banned because the distinction between good and bad lies beyond the awareness of a child. It would, however, take two centuries before the opposition to this form of scholastic child mistreatment would reach a broader scale, owing to the work of various social advocates and three whole centuries before the United Nations would, in 1989, finally produce Convention on the Rights of the Child, a document that explicitly bans any form of physical or mental violence against children, the first to do so, given that its predecessor from 1959, Declaration on the Rights of the Child, did recognize the right to protection from brutality and malice, but did not address corporal punishment explicitly. Although the United States, notably, remains the only country of the world that has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as the 20th century approached its end, corporal punishment of children at school became a universally sanctioned form of child abuse in the western world. However, this ill practice continued to reign in many parts of the developing world well into the 21st century, and, unfortunately, remains present in some places. According to the recent survey, corporal punishment in schools has been prohibited in only two-thirds of the world’s countries, while only 59 countries — that is, little less than 30 % of all countries in the world — have prohibited corporal punishment of children per se (Durrant, 2020). In fact, the United Nations estimate that, globally, 1.1 billion caregivers consider corporal punishment to be a necessary component of raising children (UNICEF, 2017). These ill beliefs, rooted in tradition, are a strong factor justifying and perpetuating these violent codes of conduct for educational purposes.
Today, luckily for the citizens of the developed world, scholastic corporal punishment has been retired and ceded place to the shaping of knowledge and character via rational argumentation, albeit only partially. In many places physical disciplining has been replaced by various subtler forms of conditioning, as by rewarding or penalizing students with points, grades and bonuses depending on whether they engage in actions that please or displease the instructor. Whether pure rationalization methods can fully replace conditioning carried out by means of rigorous and emotionless assessments or not is the subject of ongoing debates in pedagogic circles (Uskoković, 2018; Uskoković, 2020). Whatever the case, the global shifts to the right-wing, authoritarian end of the political spectrum have disfavored the softening of education and threatened to discontinue the historic transition toward turning classroom communication into one of equals and not that comprising totalitarian intellects on one side of the authority divide and sheepishly passive, conformist and victimized audience on the other. The comparatively aggressive pull to the left and in direct response to the widespread proliferation of these reactionary attitudes has not done any favor to this progressive direction of growth either, given that it has imposed excessive regulatory pressures to maintain the methodological status quo, which has, likewise, acted as an obstacle for the educational culture to transgress the current boundaries and move toward freer, more benevolent and enlightened territories. Whatever the futures hold in store, the educational realm, as it stands now, is being sandwiched amid political polarization that is ineffectual to the point of nearly total debilitation.
Since I have spent all my life and career in academia, I have had an opportunity to follow how dominant communication styles in this social realm have changed. The personal perception of this change is especially accentuated relative to my American peers, considering that I emigrated from Yugoslavia to the European Union first, and then to the United States after I completed my master of science studies in physical chemistry in 2001, which happened to be only two years after the decade long string of civil wars came to an end. In this article, I hark back to my experience as the student of an elementary school in my hometown, Belgrade, then the capital of a country named Yugoslavia, which would begin to break apart in a devastating civil war shortly thereafter. Specifically, I share with the readers the comments made by an anonymized language and literature teacher I had between the years 1989 and 1991, when I attended the last two years of elementary school, that is, the 7th and the 8th grade on the K-12 scale. During these two years I voluntarily served as a record keeper for the class and diligently captured in the back of a notebook these comments as they were spoken. Over thirty years later I rediscovered them by accident upon a visit to my hometown and was astonished by their humorous and tragicomic nature. A more recent revisit of these records convinced me that there would be benefits for the educational community if these comments were shared in light of the discourse on how attitudes, styles and values of pedagogues have changed in the past 35 years. These records, I hold, could be a starting point for an analysis of social changes that happened not only in the part of the world in which they came into being, but also globally, within the given timeframe.
Such analyses are made possible largely by the fact that there has been a great similarity between the professional and broader social acceptability of expressions of anger and frustration amongst teachers in Yugoslavia and in many other parts of the globe in the given era. For example, there was a pronounced commonality between the cruelties elementary school children were exposed to by teachers in post-Tito Yugoslavia and in Thatcher’s Great Britain (Uskoković, 2023). A survey conducted in 1990 across all states in the United States showed that in all but 11 of them physical punishments of children by the school employees were permitted, while 90 % of Americans admitted that they used physical violence to correct misbehavior (Straus, 1991). Punishments were at around the same time almost universally central to education and in approximately 90 % of problematic scholastic scenarios, the solutions resorted to by teachers involved punishments, with their percentages doubling not only for males relative to females, but also for white males relative to Black males, simply “because teachers were consistent in their concern for controlling the antisocial behavior of gifted white males, but accepted such behavior from gifted Black males” (Wooldridge & Richman, 1985). The 1980s was, in fact, the decade in which academic specialists in the United States still openly advocated for corporal punishment in schools and emphasized the numerous supposed advantages of it (Vockell, 1991). Therefore, the phrases spoken by this exemplary teacher in the classroom were by no means an exception across the entire community of K-12 teachers, both at the given time and place and globally. In fact, no known complaints regarding these comments and the accompanying shouts, smacks, banging books against desks and other outbursts of anger were, according to my memory and the records, ever brought to the attention of the school authorities, neither by the pupils nor by their parents, who considered this behavior somewhat eccentric, but still within the limits of normality. As a result, these comments can act as grounds for the building of important insights regarding where the world and the progress in education have gone in the past 35 years and where we may be expecting to find it in 35 years from now.
The goal of this article is not to elaborate on the etiological characteristics of the behavior exhibited by this one pedagogue and observed by myself as an elementary school student. Neither is the goal to delve in the gaps in institutional support and lack of professional training that have perpetuated such behavioral instances nor is it to judge it from the angle of immorality. Rather, the goal is to share the comments captured nearly four decades ago, which offer an insight into a time and culture now long gone, and contrast them against the points of view of children of the same age today. To that end, the original comments, which illustrate the norms of acceptability that existed once and that might exist again should the society undergo massive restructuration, are posed in the following section side by side with the comments of modern-day American elementary and middle school students provided in response to the original comments. These results are subsequently discussed in the effort to expand the question of what has been gained and what has been lost with the transition from freer to more politically correct and sensitive verbal expressions used by K-12 teachers. This discussion, albeit brief, forms the crux of this paper, stemming from my 10+ year experience as a teacher, at institutions including an R1 university, a California state university, a private liberal arts university and a community college, and nearly 5 times that many years as a scholar. Its conciseness ensures that the question discussed is not analyzed in excess, but expanded in new directions, offering room for prolific exploration in lieu of being answered and put a full stop on.
Method and Results
The 199 comments, angry and offensive to some and absurd and comical to others, as spoken in class by my anonymous language and literature teacher in the 7th and the 8th grade of the elementary school, a woman in her late 40s or early 50s, were preserved in a personal notebook. The seventy-five most representative comments were selected for inclusion in this document and shared with the modern-day pupils of the same or similar age, who at the time when the surveys were conducted attended 4th to 8th grade in elementary and middle schools within the Irvine Unified School District (IUSD) in Irvine, California. These students were asked for their own comments to the comments offered by the language and literature teacher 35 years ago. To retain the veracity of the original record, the comments are presented in parallel in my native Serbo-Croatian, the language in which they were spoken, and as a personal translation to English. The first of the 199 comments, which likely triggered my interest in record-keeping, was the one where the teacher called me a “monkey” and, according to the record, hit me in the head. In the comments that follow, as given in Chart 1, real names of addressees, whenever present in the original record, were left out, while comments addressing the author are denoted with an asterisk.
Selected comments uttered by the language and literature teacher in one elementary school in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in years 1989 through 1991, as captured by the author and listed chronologically. Comments directly addressing the author are marked with an asterisk.
The selected comments were read to a group of students attending elementary or middle schools in the IUSD and they were able to offer their own comments to them, focusing on their appropriateness and how they would feel if their teachers resorted to similar phrases in the classroom. These comments are listed in Chart 2. Informed consent was obtained from both parents of children included in the survey.
Discussion
Every responder to the questions regarding the appropriateness of hysterical, raging comments made by the language and literature teacher in Yugoslavia 35 years ago agreed that they would be shocked if their teachers made even vaguely similar comments to those, in or out of classroom. The responders agreed anonymously that these phrases would be unacceptable today and that there could hardly be an excuse for saying any single one of them in the environments that they know of. Had they encountered them in classes at school, they would be petrified and would most likely bring it up to the attention of the parents or the principal. The fact that what seems abnormal to them today was normal in another part of the world and at another time was surprising to them and stimulated them to think about how the world has changed in the interim. It is uncertain to what extent the raised awareness of this change is illuminative to children, although it may promote a sense of gratitude for the generally positive behavior and language they encounter at school, which they may have otherwise taken for granted.
The key ethical question to be addressed in the discussion is what the world and the educational milieus have gained and lost, if anything, with this transition from honest but hysterical infantility in the past to more controlled, sensible and politically correct stances and expressions that are prevalent today. On the one hand, most would agree that sincere expressions of innermost feelings are healthy and should be encouraged, but with a decent dose of self-control. In other words, the line demarcating being true to one’s feelings and resorting to the use of language that can hurt other’s feelings need not be as thin as the stereotypically stringent teachers of the past and people with low levels of self-awareness in general used to have it. Problematically, witnessing the legitimacy of anger outbursts like that underlying every single comment presented in Chart 1, coming from figures that should act as role models for children, justifies similar behavioral instances, which is something that children, being in their formative stages of development, are especially prone to. This author went through one such critical period as a young adult and came out of it, but is still aware that, given this prior experience, the idea that rage can be the solution to existential challenges remains embedded somewhere in the central nervous system, always risking to make a comeback when the opportunities are favorable. This is where the problematic nature of the easygoing tendency of teachers of the past to engage in assaultive rhetoric or violent physical actions becomes recognizable. In short, there is a considerable price to be paid by society for permitting the honest but uncontrolled expression of moods in a setting such as the educational.
The teacher’s repetitive outbursts of anger and comments aimed at belittling and humiliating the students, in reality, were so common and intense that they achieved a self-trivializing effect, so that after a while, no student would take these comments seriously. Each class, as a result, was anticipated by most students for its comical climax when the teacher would lose her calm and begin to vent her spleen at everyone in the classroom. While this did accustom students to violence and taught them, at best, that, ideally, violence is to be laughed off if and when encountered in the world rather than be responded to internally or externally, it also posed a dangerous precedent in terms of creating the impression amongst the students that one’s own expressions of violence need not be a big deal, when in reality they always are. The possibility that angry expressions may be offensive to someone can never be discarded and, therefore, mainstream educators would agree that it is always preferable to train students how to control their emotions and replace impulsiveness with greater levels of politeness and considerateness, even if the behavior would then appear all affected and artificial. This is exactly the direction where education, for better or worse, has headed in the last 35 years.
One indicator of whether assaultive behavior displayed in the classroom by those who should engage in this type of behavior least, namely school teachers, leads to violence exhibited on broader social scales can come from crime statistics. The results of these analyses, however, have been inconclusive, first of all because in the last of the three years on which this record was taken, the civil war in Yugoslavia broke and numerous other factors affected the rapid rise in violent acts, the annual rate of which had been, more or less, steady and fairly low until then (Zvekic, 1990). Overall, however, if the decade of civil wars, economic embargos and endemic poverty that ensued is left out of the analysis, the crime statistics appear to be on the decline since the turn of the century, which coincides with the significant softening of the language used by the local educators. Still, relative to the prewar violent crime levels, those present in the postwar times have been considerably higher (Grubač, 2008). In the United States, in contrast, the violent crime prevalence per capita has shown a steady trend of decline in the last 35 years (Congressional Research Service, 2022). More importantly, however, in 1990, the year when the demands for political correctness were virtually none in Yugoslavia and freedom to be moody and engage in even expressions like those reported here was high, whereas the limits on what can and cannot be said in the classroom were much more tightly regulated in the United States, the crime prevalence was many times higher in the United States than in Europe in general (Kalish, 1988). This puts an uncertainty on whether infantile displays of anger by teachers and their resorting to occasional displays of violence do cause assaultive behavior outside the classroom or not. The absence of the evidence, however, best not be mistaken for the evidence of absence, and most regulators and educators, myself included, would agree that playing on the safe side of things is preferable, meaning that the most optimal strategy would be to prevent behaviors similar to that discussed here for the sake of preserving broader social welfare. However, even with minimally invasive approaches, there are definite demerits of any regulations that curb freedoms of expression, and the same principle applies here as well. The socioeconomic cliché that regulation hampers innovation is a truism that should never be taken too lightly when conceiving of restrictive policies of one kind or another.
To prevent instances of behavior similar to that experienced by the author as an elementary school pupil, a number of policies have been introduced since this record was compiled. Their goal has been valid, namely to protect children against the exposure to instances of insolence displayed by both teachers and the students, but adverse consequences of these regulations have been seldom addressed. The introduction of the whistleblower protection statute under the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998, for example, mandates that all whistleblowers in federally funded institutions be protected against retaliation. This, along with the introduction of the Title IX statute offices across all campuses in the United States as a part of the Education Amendments of 1972, has produced rigorous protocols regarding how institutions will deal with any allegations of wrongdoings, and the mere presence of these policies has stood in the way of such wrongdoings before they even occurred. This is because mandated reporting of any hints of assaultive behavior presents a powerful prophylaxis against such behavioral displays, providing a model on how occurrences of assaultive actions and adverse consequences associated with them are being averted. At the same time, however, confidentiality and intimate contacts rooted in mutual trust among academic colleagues, students or any other school employees have been undermined with these policies. This can be exemplified by a hypothetical but very realistic case where a student wishes to confide in a teacher in the hope that they will offer solid advice, not knowing that the teacher is a mandated reporter to the school officials, meaning that all the supposedly confidential comments would be conveyed to relevant human resource and other administrative offices and committees to deal with further. This has led to the raising of the walls of distrust between all members of the academic multiverse and has been reinforcing the proliferation of many of the aversions and toxicities that the given policies were meant to prevent or eradicate in the first place. In a way, they have been akin to placing a dam, bulky and bloated, the way only the bureaucratic red tape can be, over a stream, to which a powerful river would react by diverting its flow and finding a different channels to go along with. Just as corporal punishment has been shown to suppress the undesired behavior, but only for it to resurface in other ways (Church, 1963; Johnston, 1972), the same effect of sublimation or condensation, but not elimination, of traits tried to be abolished occurs here. The same can be said about the discriminatory actions that should be prevented by the Title VI statute regulations, which, unlike the Title IX, which is gender-related, relates to the protected characteristics of “race, color, or national origin”, and which, by the way, is only recently starting to have the first campus coordinator positions announced (Niles, 2024): those who would eagerly engage in such actions may not dare do so in fear of repercussions, but their biases continue to thrive and be expressed whenever possible, via channels that are more surreptitious, but frequently equally influential as the more explicit ones. This is to say that education, the social sphere in which these policies have been implemented, has failed to educate those who need education most. It is failing to wipe out the biases based on superficial characteristics that should not exist in a world focused on the essence. However, it is exactly because of this neglect of the essence that surface is making a comeback as the universal focus of attention, to haunt those who have betrayed the roots.
In all, there are multiple reasons why the freedom of expression of verbal statements and emotions by teachers in the classroom should be subject to regulation. On the other hand, a number of arguments can be offered in support of the benefits of legitimizing the classroom behavior as that recorded 35 years ago. First, chronic mental conditions count as a form of disability (Dewa & Lin, 2000), and people with disabilities deserve a stable and reputable position in a society, just like everyone else does. Moreover, when children are being exposed daily to behavior that is authentically human, this familiarizes them with it and prepares them to be receptive and able to deal with a variety of challenging types of behavior they will encounter later in life. In contrast, to have a behavior like this censored and to be protected against it is to grow into an invalid from the emotional intelligence point of view, which does disservice, not service, to children. Adaptation is what humans owe their superb evolutionary success to (Antón et al., 2014) and research institutions adaptable to change have stood the greatest chance to arrive at groundbreaking discoveries (Hollingsworth & Gear, 2012), yet somehow we are finding ourselves, culturally, in an era where people demand from others the respect of specific behavioral norms instead of learning to adapt to unconventional behaviors. This fosterage of inflexibility and compliant attitudes erases a good portion of children’s emotional intelligence and creates catastrophic sociocultural consequences in the long run.
As a result of prohibiting behavior like this, we have stiffened the norms of conventionality and gradually entered the era of “one strike and you are out” policies, which currently govern not only academia, but multiple other strata of society as well. Even less favorably, as such policies take hold, people’s behavior becomes molded by fear, not freedom or genuine empathy, and as time progresses, slighter and slighter deviations from the norms start to stand out and are deemed worthy calling one out and excluding them permanently from the social groups. As a schoolboy in the years of concern here I learned about the tragedy of the exclusions of the likes of Spinoza by the Amsterdam Jewish community (Nadler, 2013) or Descartes by the ecclesiastical order of Jesuits (Winterton, 1887), only because of their dissident dispositions, but I find it an even greater tragedy that ours are now times where it has become accepted as normal for a person to be excommunicated from a profession simply because of being critical of certain aspects of it. In the educational realm and elsewhere, in fact, we have reached a critical point with respect to this systematic suppression of freedom of expression of unconventional emotion or thought. Through these clampdowns, individuals, in academia especially, be they students or their instructors, have been taught conformity more than they are being taught creative dissent, and this cannot but lead to devastating outcomes in due course. In fact, the ongoing rise of neo-fascistic ideologies at various social scales can be traced to this effect because, as it is often neglected, such ideologies feed not as much on the power of individual totalitarians as much as on masses of conformists eager to follow them and march to the beat of the same drum.
Additionally, the ongoing digital age epidemic of alexithymia among children (Yang et al., 2024), referring to the emotional disconnect they increasingly experience in relation to their own and other people’s feelings, may also be linked to the suppression of emotions and emotionality amongst their caregivers. The first on the list to be expelled from the repertoire of the permissible emotions was anger, then came sadness, then anxiety, and in the end only positivity is left. Social media, of course, have had a pivotal influence on this discrimination against fundamental human emotions by giving their users the opportunity to feign their virtual personalities and easily exclude the negative while highlighting only the positive. As a result, over prolonged periods of time, this reductionism has begun to take a serious toll on the immense breadth of natural dispositions humans were born to nurture and express. To narrow the scope of human emotions, however, is to commit nearly a crime against humanity and misunderstand that not only “fury should have an hour and anger can be a power” (The Clash, 1979), but also that every other emotion too, if used opportunely and optimally, can produce a prolific effect on psychological wellbeing and social welfare. This presents a strong argument in favor of the exposure of children to as broad of a repertoire of human emotions as possible.
Alongside the undesirable emotional effects, there are also adverse intellectual effects that arise from the linearization of the emotional space intrinsic to the human beings interacting with children. One of the well-known consequences of suppressing academic freedoms, for example, is that of the so-called chilling effect. It represents the cases where prohibited usage of certain terms or banned discussion of sensitive topics takes life out of the classroom discourse and leads to impoverished insights, compromising the quality of education. A similar scenario can be envisaged to occur whenever the natural scope of people’s ideas about the reality becomes filtered to the point of sterility. In those cases, the students will be deprived of the opportunity to engage in expansive intellectual development and their worldviews risk of becoming severely debilitated.
In sports, further, there has reigned a long-standing debate between the proponents of participatory training and the proponents of performative training (Lemonidis et al., 2014). Whereas the former aims at a sense of satisfaction and inclusiveness of all sports and management figures involved in coaching, the latter is focused on preparing the players for the best possible performance. In line with the adage that diamonds form only at high pressures, coaches preparing sportsmen and sportswomen for the best possible performance in a highly competitive environment have traditionally found it necessary to resort to the usage of a harsh vocabulary and rather violent body language to elicit the highest potential from the players. One example comes from the Serbian school of basketball, whose status as the best in the world alongside the American (Hoffman, 2024) can be explained by the combination of talent, work ethic, team spirit, holistic development, tactical knowledge, emphasis on fundamentals and fosterage of creativity and independence on the court (Mitrović, 2024), but also the coaches’ readiness to get into a conflict with the management to defend the freedom to choose their own players and playstyle, all the while sporadically screaming and shouting at the players to motivate them to perform to the best of their capacities (Anon., 2018). In fact, as I, myself, who evidently grew up in a milieu where teachers commonly resorted to yelling and beating, can attest to, transitions to an environment where coaches and managers tone their language down and know how to keep their calm have been routinely interpreted as signs of a lack of care on their part. For a mentor to show a true sense of care for his mentees, he must laugh, cry, be sad, be mad and go through all other moods, or else ironing out these behavioral hills and troughs will be understood as a sign of emotional distance. To accompany an advice with a frown, a shout and a smack on the head is under those circumstances perceived as a more cordial and effective communication than a purely textual instruction offered aloofly and distantly.
From the educational standpoint, moreover, directly facing exhibitions of resentment and ire like those captured here can be considered the starting point for a greatest training we would be offered to take in our lives, which is how to empathize with those who need empathy most, convert their outlooks, heal their emotional ills and help them see the world in a brighter light. Encounters with troubled behaviors should, therefore, be thanked for their offering us an extraordinary opportunity for our growth. The potential for growth under these circumstances is, in fact, arguably much greater than that stemming from our dealing with behavior that has been made flat by being polished to death with the sandpaper of political correctness. Needless to add, this correctness is in today’s world, sadly, more often conformist and opportunist in cause than rooted in communicational sensibilities that come straight from the heart. It is an essential survival skill to deploy in competitive social milieus instead of a genuinely empathetic expression, coming, as such, with covertly sharp edges and a good dose of acerbity despite the polished and sugarcoated surface.
In all, at the end of this concise discussion, a definite answer to the question of what has been won and lost with the transition of the educational practices from the emotionally erratic and didactically discourteous methods of the past to the more emotionally controlled and politically correct approaches of today cannot be provided. Short of purely nostalgic idealization of assaultive behavior by those who experienced it as children and then moved on beyond it, there is not much to be regretted with regard to the retirement of the ill pedagogic style portrayed here in most of the developed and developing worlds. Still, it is this author’s personal opinion that the right to work should be everyone’s and that everyone’s freedom of speech and expression of emotions, short of that directly inciting the imposition of physical harm or unjust discrimination, should be protected and encouraged. Dissemination of opinions that can indirectly produce adverse individual or social consequences if adopted and converted to physical action or various forms of discriminatory decision-making is best tackled not by suppressing them, but by motivating social activism and progressive thought that will parry these opinions and promote constructive dialogue with regard to every topic of interest and concern. Social progress follows a Hegelian, dialectical path (Hegel, 1817), meaning that the suppression of people’s theses, even when they are being outright toxic, automatically suppresses their gracious and benevolent antitheses, and without the clashes of these two, no syntheses of higher and more progressive states of social order can be reached or foreseen. In short, one of the most critical battles to be fought on educational and other sociocultural floors in the decades ahead of us is that of ensuring freedom of speech for all, but especially those whose opinions are at odds with ours.
Conclusion
In this paper I explored the significant transformations in pedagogical methods over the past decades, juxtaposing the emotionally erratic and verbally harsh educational practices of the past with the more politically correct, emotionally regulated approaches of the present. While the shift has brought undeniable progress in creating safer and more inclusive learning environments, it has also raised questions about the potential loss of emotional authenticity and the retarded development of adaptive resilience among students. The historical anecdotes and contemporary reflections presented here serve to illustrate the complexity of this evolution, emphasizing that the balance between freedom of expression and regulation remains a delicate one. As we navigate the future of education, the challenge lies in fostering environments that respect individuality and creativity while promoting respect, empathy, and intellectual rigor. Ultimately, the discourse on what has been gained and lost in education must remain ongoing, as it holds the key to building a more equitable and enlightened academic culture for generations to come.
Acknowledgment
Dedicated, cordially, to all my teachers of present and past, formal and informal.
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AI statement
No form of artificial intelligence was used in the preparation of this manuscript at any level.
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Funding
No funding was used for this study.
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Copy Editing services:
Portuguese Version: Roberto Candido traducao@tikinet.com.brText preparation and English revision: João Anacleto traducao@tikinet.com.br
Availability of data and materials
Data shall be made available upon reasonable request.
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Edited by
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Responsible editors:
Associate Editor: Chantal Medaets cmedaets@unicamp.br>Editor-in-Chief: Helena Sampaio hsampaio@unicamp.br>
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
20 Oct 2025 -
Date of issue
2025
History
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Received
17 Jan 2025 -
Accepted
18 June 2025
