I don’t want to study. “Difficult students”, between psychiatry and pedagogy

Abstract

The articles in this section were drawn from a few interventions which were made during a workshop organized by Netforpp Europa, the European Network for Research and Education in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, in April 2015. During the meeting, psychiatrists, teachers and pedagogists confronted themselves with the problem of difficult students, those who lose interest in studying, achieve poor results, or even leave school. Many proposals and answers were put forth, which suggests how behind problems relevant to studying there lay several different difficulties. A few interventions highlighted how the culture of consumption and of immediate pleasure, coupled to the idea according to which there are children who are made for studying and others who are not, play in favour of the sentence: “I don’t want to study”; which often should be read as “I can’t study”. This happens in particular during that delicate and complex period which is puberty-adolescence. On the contrary, if we start from the idea that thrust towards knowledge is peculiar to human beings, and to children in particular, then, when this thrust vanishes, relevant reasons must be found, without preconceptions. In this case, it is possible to find efficacious ways to face both simple cases, which may be solved within schools themselves, and more difficult cases which require the intervention of mental health professionals.