But that’s the reality in most countries. As much as you want to pretend it is not like this, what would happen if, as a student, you suddenly made a public interview and criticise your school or university and the teachers? Or your sport club and your coaches? Especially if you were a person known to public, so whatever you say would be followed by many people…. There would be consequences. Even if the school was not able to do anything to you publicly, you would still deal with very subtle changes of behaviour from everyone towards you, the coaches would give up on you (unless they really, really needed you), the teachers at school would continue to teach you but would stop bending backwards to help you and instead they would just do their minimum… There is no point pretending that this is only happening in Russia. This is everywhere. I am all for speaking up, as long as the person realises that there are consequences and is prepared to live with them. Pretending that there won’t be consequences is naive.
