Reflections on the phenomenon of apathy in school settings

Those of us who work together with teachers trying to accompany them by serving as co-thinkers in the hard task of growing as educators and make contributions for the transformation of education, we often receive inquiries regarding the behavior of children and adolescents called "apathy". It is for these consultations, that in PsicologíaOnline we have decided to offer some Reflections on the phenomenon of apathy in school settings.

These educators point to this phenomenon that has increased in recent times and affects a countless students of all ages, such as "a lack of interest" in school, in activities, in the future, etc.

Index

1. State of the question
2. Psychological development of children and adolescents
3. The educator's responsibility

Of course apathy as a condition has been very competently studied by professionals from all human sciences and treated in therapeutic areas of mental health prevention. What leads me to develop this framework of reflections is the need to provide an answer that these teachers expect regarding the possibility of doing something in the daily task regarding this phenomenon that also seems to exceed the school environment to settle in it society.

But, what does it mean "apathy"? No consideration should ignore the question since it leads us to the deep meaning of the term and will allow us to detach the considerations from it. The term "apathy" comes from two etymological aspects: the verb p £ scw (pasjo) in Greek means first, "be affected by a passion or feeling; experience some pleasant or painful impression "From there is derived p £ qoj (pathos) which means "passion (in all its senses); feeling, feeling, emotion. In the Latin aspect, closely related to the Greek, and which will later become Spanish, the verb is used "patior": suffer, suffer, endure, tolerate, consent, allow "and its derivatives: "patiens": the patient and "patientia": tolerance, submissionNote the subtle differences between the two slopes, the Greek and the Latin.

On the other hand, the word "apathy", carries a prefix "a", one of whose meanings is that of "deprivation, lack of, impotence".Once all these data have been collected, what does this linguistic analysis contribute to the subject at hand? It precisely tells us that "something has been withdrawn, suppressed, private" and that something is "passion, feeling, experience"Apathy forms thus a state of subtraction, of concealment, emotional states are suppressed, appearing as a feeling of emptiness, of absence. And the funny thing is that a small particle, the letter "a" has given us the clue to discover the content of this phenomenon.

And this is what teachers point out in their pedagogical practice: children and adolescents, What is it that they withdraw, subtract from their school life? What are they depriving themselves of? Is it just a personal situation or is it intricate social networks of interaction at stake? Why is this happening? What are your causes? The following reflections will try to weave the warp and weft of the response to this problem.

The first answer to these questions is to ask another question: What is the situation of children and adolescents in the educational system?

The passage through the educational system corresponds to the stages of childhood, puberty and adolescence, moments of anxiety and uncertainty, where there is an openness to the social that transcends the small family world, often without receiving help from adults. During these years, students in school not only learn curricular content, but other hidden, subtle and silent programming with which they they learn rules of social interaction, power relations, values ​​that differ from those that are preached and that are acted out beyond verbal language.

The authoritarian bonding modalities are transmitted in the styles of communication and learning and are evidenced in the obsession with uniformity and disciplinary regulations, in the absence of dialogue, intolerant attitudes towards dissent. For many students, school has become dehumanized title and certificate vending office; in a place where there is no place for the new, the unforeseen, the different; where indiscipline is only experienced as a personal attack on adults who hold authority. The student who travels the steep roads (curricula) of the educational system, also perceives the dichotomy between school and extra-school learning (abyss) Live learning as something whose justification and usefulness is enclosed In herself; he develops activities organized by teachers whose purpose he often does not know.

Has in mind "what do you have to study?" sometimes he has no idea "how" or "why" to do it. He perceives frequent and natural objects of school life: books, papers, blackboards, chalk, etc. and also the dispossession of what is "proper" to him.

If you were asked what the purpose of what you are studying is for, the answers would be around the model of society: a model of "accumulation" and "marginalization": "few arrive, only the gifted". The contents are felt as imposed and rigidly linked to the context in which they were learned and their application is possible in similar contexts: the classroom. The excessive priority to a small sector of the personality, puts the emphasis on some intellectual factors: the "retain" and "repeat": almost exclusive requirements of the final exams that are called final for nothing: all education aims and ends in them.

It is not surprising that many teachers rightly wonder what it is that the student "withdraw", "delete" in his school life. It is precisely what is left out of these exclusive factors mentioned above: feeling, experiencing, observing, investigating, intuiting, wanting, the passion to discover, etc.

Recently a survey was conducted in a college of technical education among students of the last years. One of the questions consisted in pointing out "what characteristics of the school are most important? for you? "Some responses reflected the thinking of almost everyone interviewed, such as example: "One of the characteristics that seems important to me is that every time the year passes, you feel less willing to study" This from "less desire to"Doesn't it remind you of something?

School segregation and classifications of children in school, they are another of the brutal forms of molding ("training", it is called) that the school frequently performs. There is little concern for the personality of each student and for the respect they deserve and the little that exists is diverted towards categorization and "labeling". often subtly manifested in judgments, impatience, disparaging gestures and devaluing comments, outbursts of anger and irritation, and raucous screams (The consultations with the speech therapists testify to this) And to all this must be added the self-devaluation of the child and the adolescent as a form of reaction to the environment devaluing. Remember that the famous defense mechanisms studied by psychoanalysis can also be systemically reinterpreted as "exchange mechanisms" with the environment.

The child from his earliest age is forming what has been called the "self-concept": the knowledge you have of yourself. Later behavior depends on that self-concept in that it will behave according to what he believes he is capable and not so much for what he really is. Hence, many students anticipate because they "think they know" the results of their attitude. Indicators are the reactions of the adults around you; what they expect of the child severely conditions what the child will do.

If you anticipate a hypothetical failure, efforts will be minimal and you will expect bad results, giving adults the verification of the certainty of their judgments while reinforcing them in their devaluing attitudes, thus generating what is called a "feedback loop". In reality there is no self-concept that has not passed through others. The aspiration levels of students are generally a function of what their teachers expect. These expectations about students can become self-fulfilling "prophecies". We should remember here the research in the area of ​​social psychology that was carried out and that continues to be carried out with the same results Regarding the phenomenon called "Pygmalion effect" (which refers to the mythological character who falls in love with his own work in such a way that he permeates life). The student sees himself in others as in a mirror and ends up adjusting to what others expect of him. It is easy to verify in school settings, the correlation between "bad grades" and a negative self-image: school failure is identified with personal failure.

The sieve used to measure the student's person is often exclusively school: "the student has eaten the person" Apathy is not a static phenomenon to be studied in a cabinet; has a dynamic destiny: it is born, develops, leads to disinterest, disinterest breeds boredom and boredom shows many faces: passivity, inertia, sadness and even something very ours: the anger and from there begins to approach the other pole of apathy: aggression rebel. It is not very strange to find, especially in adolescents, the alternation between apathy, inertia and exasperation in school and extra-school behaviors. From passive rejection: apathy, inertia, inhibition, reverie, escape, absence, to active rejection: aggressiveness, rebellion. Some specialists have referred to a situation as contagious: apathy and boredom are transmitted from one student to another, from students to teachers, from teachers to students and the institution infects everyone. Everything that has been pointed out about apathy in children and adolescents could be referred to teachers and educators.

Is that at some point teachers go to occupy the same place as the student in the educational system: the place of devaluation, non-participation, marginalization in decisions, exploitation as an education worker, coercion, etc. inexorably generating affective mutilation that apathy implies and which is then transmitted (if it can be said that way) to the student. The teacher and the educator may think that their intentions are good (and to be so at the conscious level) they may pretend critical reflection, creative learning, active teaching, promotion of personality, rescue of the subject, etc., etc. but define the pedagogical link as a link of dependence and submission, and this is where one of the most severe contradictions suffered by many teachers who, in good faith and more than noble intentions, complain that their students are affected by this syndrome of disinterest and apathy.

The merits of active learning are preached, but under the assumptions of a natural dependence, the more passive the student, the better the objectives of a "formative education" will be fulfilled. And if this happens like this, apathy is already installed in the student: he knows that in order to meet these goals and be accepted he must "mortgage" his own interests, his curiosity, his "passion." "My education ended when I entered school," he once said. Bernard Shaw.

Apathy does not have to have a tragic or depressing face. It does not consist precisely in this, but the nucleus of the question is in the "withdrawal" and the "suppression" of one's passion by strict adherence to the "performance principle". I would venture to affirm that behind very successful children, the phenomenon of subjection apathy hides. Sometimes what is nothing more than training is called education. Apathy and disinterest have many sources that engender them.

In order to understand them, one must take into account: personal history, family environment, social motivations, the influences of the incommunicado mass media (How many hours does a boy spend in front of the electronic pacifier on TV?); the models proposed by society that parents and teachers reinforce, the socio-economic and political situation, the cultural tradition, etc. (a famous thinker of the s. XIX expressed it by saying: "The millions and millions of deaths in our past history, oppresses our brain, preventing us from thinking") Without a totalizing and integrating perception and systemic thinking, it is almost impossible to have a fairly accurate picture of this phenomenon.

We are deeply saddened by the fact that the school is not adapted to current needs and that the educators are not sufficiently prepared to face this problem. In the same way, disinterest and apathy cannot be reduced to just one individual psychological factor. They are inextricably linked to a reaction to a complex world of social influences and relationships. In a brilliant way, like all his productions, the father of psychoanalysis, Don Segismundo, has given us the guideline and orientation. enough to understand the phenomenon we are interested in studying: "The opposition between individual psychology and social psychology or collective, which at first glance may seem very deep, loses much of its significance as soon as we subject it to more careful examination.

Individual psychology it certainly makes isolated man concrete and investigates the ways in which he tries to achieve the satisfaction of his instincts, but only very seldom and under certain exceptional conditions is it allowed to dispense with the relationships of the individual with his similar. In the individual psychic life, "the other" appears always integrated, effectively, as a model, object, auxiliary or adversary, and of this Thus, individual psychology is at the same time and from the beginning social psychology, in a broad sense, but fully justified.

The relationships of the individual with his parents and siblings, with the person who is the object of his love and with his doctor, that is, all those that have been up to now. object of psychoanalytic research, can aspire to be considered as social phenomena, thus placing themselves in opposition to certain other processes, called by us narcissistic, in which the satisfaction of the drives eludes the influence of other people or dispenses with them in absolute. In this way, the opposition between social and narcissistic psychic acts (Bleuler would say perhaps autistic)falls within the domains of individual psychology and it does not justify a differentiation between it and social or collective psychology. (Sigmund Freud "Psychology of the Masses and Analysis of the Ego") Could the same apply to the Psychopedagogy? Are learning difficulties only due to the individual or also "to him, his ties and circumstances"? .

Not a few pedagogues believe that many of the ills suffered by schoolchildren should be sought in the school itself. For some participants and those responsible for the educational activity, to speak and not even mention the difficulties of the school and the failures and malfunction of the educational system, is to have "bad vibes" or "make attempts to destroy the school".

Taking this reasoning to the extreme, hold those who describe and diagnose it responsible for the disintegration of the system. In this way they have an excellent alibi to refrain from any action on this reality. For my part, I think that knowing more and more deeply and better the mechanisms by which the disinterest and mutilation that apathy supposes is produced, is to create the conditions to act and undertake the profound changes that our children, adolescents and young people need to be themselves, without affective mutilation or intellectuals.

The discussion of whether the conditions described are present or not, and to what extent school, it is superfluous: it belongs to another investigation that has already been carried out and repeated countless times. It would be convenient for the reader of these notes to interpret that if these conditions are met, it does not matter where or to what extent, it is likely that the phenomenon of apathy is related to them. There is also no linear relationship between causes and effects, much less in the field of human behaviors that are located in another model of understanding and analysis. Human behaviors follow a pattern of circular causality taking forms of "feedback loops" Detecting apathy as school experience, it is likely (and will have to be proven) that it is linked to the situation that children and adolescents experience inside and outside the system educational.

It is also linked to other causes that should be investigated and related to each other and this is more than obvious. The idealization of the conditions in which education takes place or the denial of its most unpleasant, probably not driving or helping at all to solve the problem of apathy school. They only serve to provide an excuse for the adult but block the possibility of worrying about the student. (I interrupt the writing of this note. A student from a career in psychopedagogy comes to greet me. I ask him about her studies, how things are going, if she is happy. He tells me no; that she is doing poorly in her studies (however, I remember her as a very good student) Reason? It cannot finish with a subject because it has been "crossed out" three times and it is going to the fourth. I ask him why.

Does not know. He thinks he has studied a lot. I keep asking to see if the teacher gave him reasons why he doesn't pass. It seems not. He only receives a reply "It's not what the teacher wants"And what does the teacher want? I insist uselessly. They don't explain it to him. I keep asking: did they tell you what is the criterion with which the subject is evaluated, what are the minimum requirements to pass, what are the objectives to be achieved, how you have to prepare the subject, with what method you have to study, what are the faults you have to correct, etc., etc. etc.? Negative answer. I bid you warmly and offer my unconditional support so that you can move forward. (Psychopedagogy is a key career at the moment in a country that needs to learn) he thanks me but tells me that "he no longer wants to continue, he does not know if it is worth finishing the degree. It goes. I am left alone. I am outraged. It fills me with anger. I feel a heat that rises throughout my body... it must be passion... I recognize it... it has accompanied me all my life.

I feel that I am alive... I swear to continue fighting for a better education, without letting my arms fall even though Leon's voice resounds in my ears: "Five centuries the same ..." After all that has been said, a very obvious question arises and it is the one that many teachers ask themselves: What can be done? Is the treatment of apathy only a problem for specialists? Is it exclusive to the therapeutic field? Is it possible to undertake a transformation of the structures that make apathy and disinterest possible? How do you do it? Where do you start? Apathy as I pointed out before must be investigated and treated from an interdisciplinary approach. These adnotations are intended to treat the approach from the role of the teacher and that of the institution. It is essential that these ideas are completed and extended through the active role of the reader of the same. The first consideration about the role of the teacher and the educator is that the most effective task is that of prevention. I resort again to the etymologies: The preposition "pre" means "before", "in advance", "in advance

What is the role of the teacher in the learning situation? The learning situation is social. Teachers have "partners" in learning, not "subjects". The educational task consists of organizing experiences through communication:

1. Let that the student speak and express himself
2. Prevent repeating lessons learned by heart
3. Induce him to use other capabilities in addition to the intellectuals
4. Promote the expression of personal experiences (what did you see, what did you feel, how did you experience it?) and especially their opinions (what do you think about what we are dealing with?
5. Ensure that the student establishes with his classmates a communication "constructive"and not merely "informative"
6. Bring out the capabilities (to work with the best that each one has)
7. Create a climate where everyone feels valued
8. Find the way each student succeeds in something
9. Present education as capacity development (self-deployment) and not as an obstacle course or hurdle to jump
10. Ensure that the student learns to "love yourself"
11. Boost the identity growth: empower and promote the BEING more than the HAVING
12. Ensure that the "student don't eat the person"
13. Accompany the development TOTAL person

The more valued and accepted the student feels, the more it will help him to advance in his learning. If the teacher manages to have an authentic and transparent relationship, of warm acceptance, of valuation as a different person, where he sees the student as he is, probably This helps the student to experience and understand aspects of himself, to better undertake and face the problems. It would be very naive on the other hand, to wait and pretend that everything happens in a magical way. It is hard work and the results are not always perceived; That is why the educator's task has been compared to that of the gardener:

"We can think of ourselves not as teachers, but as gardeners. A gardener does not grow flowers, he tries to give them what he believes will help them grow and they will grow on their own. The mind of a child, like a flower, is a living thing. We cannot make it grow by putting things in it, just as we cannot make a flower grow by sticking leaves and petals on it. All we can do is surround the growing mind with what it needs to grow and have faith that it will take what it needs and grow. " (John Holt)

For many teachers the problem of motivation in the daily task is an insurmountable obstacle. Motivation has been widely studied by all streams of psychological research. Today we already know that the term does not indicate a movement (motivation comes from "move")"from the outside in" (it is called "incentive") but on the contrary comes "from the inside out" and that a person "is motivated" to herself. Strictly speaking it is not possible "motivate others"although we have already installed it in the popular language, but in reality what we do is create the conditions and the climate so that others can "motivate" (move) If in doubt, consult the works of Frederick Herzberg on motivation.

Returning to the educational task, student "is interested" Y "is motivated" if the teacher does his best to put it "in front of reality"taking into account that an experience makes sense if it is compared and confronted with the life that the student lives. Active pedagogy is more a state of mind and an attitude of the teacher, than a problem of applying techniques.

A theme has been developed among education specialists focused on the role of "mediation" from the teacher whose function would be to officiate "bridge" between the student and the task, between the student and the object of knowledge. The performance of this role would make it possible for the student to carry out her own experience in the achievement of knowledge. This model of co-operation (also called "symmetric link of complementary co-operation": symmetric because both are learning; of co-operation because they work together; complementary because the teacher complements what the student needs, because he started before and knows methods of how learn) has a starting point: the needs of the student and an end point: the acquisition of knowledge "by appropriation".

Note that the activity:

1. this student-centered
2. the teacher orders obstacles to knowledge
3. does not use violence to achieve "passive adaptation"
4. the objective is the difficulty that the student must overcome in the achievement of knowledge
5. learning is appropriating the instruments to know and transform reality (one of the three objectives set by UNESCO for education: learning to be; learn to learn and learn to do).

In this model, the object of knowledge is no longer the exclusive property of the teacher but is outside both and the strategy would be to summon, invite, enthuse the student to "go together in their search" thus constituting a true "adventure" of knowledge, which would no longer be to be "accumulated" but sought, analyzed, investigated, transformed and "constructed".

This situation allows the teacher to be freed from the "anguish to accumulate" information and then routinely pass it on and then devote their energies to developing learning and teaching methods. search, proposals for materials and experiences, to put the student in contact with reality by promoting research and experimentation. Instead of pretending that students "take care of him", the teacher will be "to serve the students".

All of this pedagogical bustle supposes a true transaction in the rigid symbolic space of traditional education, of roles, links, objects of knowledge, methodologies, use of materials, location and use of the physical learning space (the classroom).

All of the above places all of us who are dedicated to education facing the problem of change. Changes in education are systems changes. But there is a reality and it is that even when changes in the teacher are interrelated with other aspects of the system, there is nothing and no one who can change the teacher if he does not. Only the teacher can change the teacher.

The much mentioned "active pedagogy" it requires profound changes. Just as apathy requires to develop a climate and certain conditions at the individual and social level, in the same way promoting in the classes to students as active subjects, constructors of their own learning, requires a significant restructuring of the spaces of learning.

This leads us to the idea of ​​a "passage" from one situation to another, from one model to another; from a place of passivity to another of activity, from a model of exclusion to one of inclusion that prioritizes participation in the educational task, the only condition for apathy not to be present. Participate is "take a part, the one that corresponds to him" in a social group, apathy is "withdrawing"

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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