My first teacher

[Ingemar]

First, AFAIR, the original Pascal specification had strings in it. Second, I think your teacher was on good track. You learn more when there are more restrictions, which you need to overcome. Sure, you would probably liked that the language, compiler and/or your teacher would do the entire homework for you, but you will not learn anything this way. In a learning process sometimes you need to start with pure basics. After all, if you can't handle the lack of strings (which, in other languages, such as C/C++ simply don't exist), how are you going to handle more complex tasks?

I for one would really appreciate to have a teacher back then to teach me Pascal, no matter how rudimentary or restricted it would have been.

The big damage they did was to convince all students that Pascal was a toy language. No information about modern dialects. That is unforgivable. Giving specific tasks that should be dealt with under limitations is another thing, that can be useful.