What the Pandemic Left Behind: Bonds, oundaries, and Warnings for Education

Abstract

This reflective article analyses the transformations of the pedagogical bond during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular emphasis on the tensions between family and school in the context of forced virtuality. Based on significant scenes and vignettes drawn from psychopedagogical practice, examined in dialogue with educational, philosophical and psychopedagogical contributions, it explores how the intensification of family intervention affected the school’s function as a space of symbolic mediation. The article argues that the virtualization of schooling, in many cases, led to a reabsorption of educational processes into the domestic sphere, limiting the school’s role as a space for separation from family ties, openness to otherness and the
construction of autonomy. It also examines the consequences of this process for the teacher’s role, the construction of trust, and the conditions for subject formation in children and adolescents. It concludes that the pandemic not only transformed the material
conditions of teaching but also put into crisis the school’s function as a mediating institution between the family and the social sphere. In this regard, the article highlights the need to rethink the school as an essential space to produce the common good and the enabling of singular trajectories.