The Parent-Teacher Meeting Where the Teacher Apologised for a Grade
In a Belgrade primary school in May 2026, a maths teacher was explaining to nine parents why she had given a C. Sociologically, this is the moment when the authority of the Serbian teacher no longer consists in declaring, but in justifying.
Last Tuesday, at a parent-teacher meeting in a fifth-grade class at a primary school on Vozdovac, the maths teacher spoke a sentence three times that would once have been unthinkable in the Serbian school system:
If parents consider the test was unfair, they may submit a complaint to the principal.
Nine parents, seated in school benches sized for twelve-year-olds, listened to her gravely, the way one listens to a lawyer explaining a procedure. No one was angry, no one raised their voice. The teacher was explaining why nine pupils had received a C, as though she had to justify it. It was twenty past seven in the evening.
A change in the type of authority
I bring this scene not as a critique of the parents, nor as a critique of the teacher. I bring it as the moment in which the change in the type of authority Serbian education is undergoing becomes visible, slowly and without public debate.
Twenty years ago, a fifth-grade maths teacher did not explain to parents why she had given a C. Parents, if they came to the meeting at all, listened to a brief report on conduct and progress and went home. A C was a C. Now a C is a question that requires justification, a complaint, possibly a committee.
What has changed is not the grade, but the definition of authority. The teacher is no longer a person acting from a position of knowledge the parent recognises. She has become the provider of a service against which the parent has the right to lodge a complaint, as with a bank or a telecom.
Bourdieu and the dismantling of the pedagogical mandate
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in the volume “Reproduction” (1970), describes pedagogical action as an act of symbolic violence, in the sense that it does not seek the pupil’s or parent’s consent but rests on the teacher’s socially recognised mandate. Bourdieu wrote this as a critique.
But he warned at the same time:
The dismantling of that mandate, if it occurs without being replaced by an alternative system of legitimising knowledge, is dangerous, because it leaves evaluation to an individual client-provider relation.
That is exactly what is happening in Serbia.
71 percent of teachers have had a grade challenged
Some figures. According to a 2024 study by the Centre for Education Policy, fully 71 percent of secondary school teachers in Serbia have reported that in the past three years they have had a grade or disciplinary measure challenged by a parent at least once.
Sixty percent reported that at least once they had agreed to change a grade after a conversation with a parent. Formally, through a complaint, or informally, through agreement. Thirty-eight percent stated they adjust pedagogical procedure to parental expectations “often” or “always.”
These are not numbers describing a lack of trust, they describe a structural change in the profession. When a teacher adjusts grades daily to parental preferences, she is no longer doing the same profession.
Arendt, fear and trust
It is worth raising a question that is usually skipped. Was the Serbian teacher’s authority in 1985 just, so that we defend it, or was it simply strong, so that it now looks just in retrospect.
Hannah Arendt, in the essay “The Crisis in Education” from 1958 (published in “Between Past and Future”), draws a distinction between:
- authority that rests on fear
- authority that rests on trust in the tradition the teacher carries
Arendt observed that in modern societies both types of authority have eroded, but not at the same pace. Fear eroded faster than trust, because parents began to contest fear earlier than they admitted that trust in the tradition was no longer their value. This is a valuable framework for the Serbian situation.
What happened to the Serbian teacher
The Serbian teacher has, since 1990, lost two pillars that made her an authority:
- economic, a wage that secured middle-class status
- ideological, a society-wide shared story of what the school is
The wage has eroded in real terms. The average teacher’s wage in 2026 is around 78,000 dinars, roughly €660, well below the European middle class. The shared story has been left to every family to build alone.
The parent who tells the child “the teacher is wrong” is no longer the exception, it is the standard. When that standard meets a teacher who earns €660 and works with thirty-two children in a class, the outcome is what I saw on Tuesday. Justification instead of declaration.
The meta-lesson for a generation
The consequences are sociologically serious and not only pedagogical. The generation now finishing primary school is learning, above the academic content, a meta-lesson.
Every grade can be challenged with a persistent enough complaint. Every assessment of knowledge is a political matter the parent can negotiate with the institution. When this generation reaches university, it will not know how to receive a professor’s grade without contesting it. When it reaches employment, it will not know how to receive a manager’s assessment without litigation.
Sociologist Mladen Lazic, in “Waiting for Capitalism” (Sluzbeni glasnik, 2011), described the transition as a process in which institutions turn into arenas of negotiation rather than seats of legitimacy. The parent-teacher meeting at which a C is explained is a micro-arena, but structurally identical.
Dismantling the authoritarian teacher as “net gain”
A counter-argument I have to include, because it is serious. There is a reading from progressive circles of educational science according to which the dismantling of the authoritarian teacher is a net gain. A child who can challenge an unfair grade, they say, is a child learning to question authority, a precondition of democratic citizenship.
The argument is correct in its logical form. But it presupposes the existence of a parallel structure that teaches children the difference between legitimate challenge and the habit of challenge. That parallel structure is currently absent from Serbian schools. Only the first layer is present, the habit of challenge, without the second, the criteria of when to challenge.
We work it out more often than we go to committee
I return to Tuesday. Near the end of the meeting, one parent asked: “And if we file a complaint, could the test be repeated?”
The teacher replied: “That depends on the committee, but in practice we work it out more often than we go to committee.”
I carried that sentence with me all day. We work it out more often than we go to committee. That is Serbian education 2026 in a sentence.
The question for those who make the decisions, and there are fewer and fewer of them because the decisions are made daily by teachers themselves, is: if we keep working things out, who in ten years will know what the test was. The question for parents is: what are we teaching children when we challenge a C. The question for the rest of us is: is a school in which the teacher apologises for a grade still a school, or already something else, for which we do not yet have a name.
