Isn't that putting the bar too high?
> Should teachers continue to bully kids who can't sit still?
There's no mention of that in the article.
The author also makes assumptions that look rather fanciful. There's no reason to take his explanations/rationalizations at face value.
If you want to teach someone anything while yelling at them, or making them uncomfortable because the room is too hot, or by making them do meaningless puzzles that don't relate to the material it deeply compromises your goal of teaching them.
Those things finally made sense to me when I did a short screener for autistic masking and found myself in the 99th percentile.
So should we judge the teachers based on how they tried to make decisions in the moment when the author was young, or should we judge them based on the results of their decisions with the knowledge that we have now? I find that quite a hard question to answer definitively, but I do know that I tend to use the former rule for myself and the latter rule for others, which certainly seems quite unfair to me.
The question of "guilt" or "judgement" is more complicated, as you say. Where many people go wrong is that they automatically jump from harm + responsibility towards guilt. That's how you end up with articles like these where the author feels like he has to choose between anger towards his teachers and thanking them because they tried their best. That's a false dichotomy if I have ever seen one.
A teacher who traumatizes a child isn't that different from a surgeon who botches a surgery. It doesn't mean the surgeon is a terrible person but neither does it mean you have to be thankful to the surgeon because he tried and because he operated successfully on other people.