Spain leads the European Union in early school leaving, with a rate of 21.9% of young people aged between 18 and 24 who have prematurely abandoned the education system, having completed at most the first cycle of secondary education. This percentage doubles the community average (11.1%) and is still very far from the objective of reducing early school leaving to 15% by 2020, according to a report published in March 2015 by Eurostat. And it is that, although the early school leaving rate has been reduced from 30.3% registered in 2006 to 23.6% in 2013 and 21.9% in 2014, dropout figures remain very high.
But… Why does a student decide to abandon their studies (school dropout)? What is behind their decision? What makes them give up? School dropout is not an individual decision; it is conditioned by factors that are not only personal but also contextual. It has been found that the main reasons why students have stopped studying are:
Boredom and characteristics of boys/girls: the appeal of video games and technological devices is far superior to the knowledge offered by textbooks. Furthermore, a high percentage of school failure cases are due to difficulties such as dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or vision or hearing problems. It is essential to detect these causes in time so that the student does not fall behind their peers. We still hear expressions like “you’re lazy” or “you’re not good for studying” when faced with these problems.
Economic problems: the lack of money to continue secondary and higher education causes students to abandon their formative stage prematurely or prevents them from developing their full potential.
Family recognition: if the value of education is not recognized in families, it will be difficult for the student to appreciate it, and therefore, early abandonment is more likely compared to families where education is valued and given its due importance.
Self-esteem and self-confidence: those who have good academic performance have a positive opinion of themselves and their abilities as students. Conversely, the student who fails builds a negative schema of their academic abilities and possibilities. The attitudes and beliefs students have about themselves in school are decisive and powerful for their academic success.
Lack of guidance: teachers and counselors almost always have more students than they can properly attend to, and many parents are very busy with their jobs, so ensuring the continuity of their children’s studies can become a difficult task and a real dilemma. The continuous training of teachers, the completion of specializations in pedagogy, would help improve this aspect.
Stress: attending classes, doing homework, and participating in extracurricular activities are too many demands. Many boys and girls have trouble keeping up with the rigorous pace of their studies.
School bullying: in cases of harassment or bullying, early detection by parents and teachers and the adoption of appropriate measures are very important.
Apathy and lack of motivation: often, young people lack inspiration and motivation. The “culture of effort” is little considered in our society; both friends and the social environment in which the student moves can influence them to abandon their studies prematurely. Furthermore, lately, with the crisis and high unemployment rates, many students do not see a university degree as useful for finding a job, but rather prefer to directly enter the workforce and start earning money.
Learning environment: the relationship with teachers or the lack of resources and support in schools can also be some of the reasons that motivate students to drop out of school. They do not fully adapt to the school environment.
Failures in the education system: sometimes, the education system does not precisely help many students achieve better grades. Reducing the high rates of school failure in Spain has always been an objective of successive governments, which have been approving different education system reform laws to this day.
Most students are losing interest in their studies and are content with the little they earn in their first jobs.
Furthermore, with the current evaluation system, students are being prepared to pass exams but not for life, which is what is truly important. Learning is not about passing exams. The best student cannot be “the best repeater of what the teacher says.” Through ISEP’s training programs for educators, we invite our students to have critical and analytical thinking about current educational policies and to contribute their grain of sand to modify the education system from the classrooms and not the offices.
Oscar González, primary education teacher and author of the book “365 proposals for educating,” proposes some strategies to reduce school failure. Knowing what other professionals contribute is necessary to initiate both personal and professional change:
1. A truly continuous and comprehensive evaluation that considers not only the results of a test or exam and is applied to the real learning context. This can be achieved by evaluating through various types of tests: self-assessment, peer evaluation, etc. In this way, the student is at all times a “constructor” of their own learning, and the teacher’s role is not to evaluate and assign a grade but to empower the student and serve as a guide in this process. There is already a center working along these lines in our country with an educational method imported from Harvard.
2. All the knowledge we can acquire is useless if we are then “emotionally illiterate,” incapable of showing our feelings to others, of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, etc. We live in an excessively competitive society, and it is precisely for this reason that we need to educate our children and students to grow emotionally healthy. Educate them to compete not against others but against themselves: the challenge is not to be the best but to be better than yesterday. Let’s educate for strengths: that they learn to tolerate frustration, to know how to wait, to know how to win, and to accept life’s defeats and setbacks. That is the essence of education. If we educate them to be the best, we will be perpetuating the society we have today, where anything goes just to be first, where the end always justifies the means.
3. Homework, yes, but with nuances. It’s not about eliminating it 100%; the ideal would be to start it at school and allocate time to finish it there. If this doesn’t happen, the child shouldn’t spend more than half an hour doing it (in primary school). It is necessary for there to be coordination among teachers so that there isn’t an accumulation of tasks that prevents the child from having time to play, do extracurricular activities, etc.
The Master’s in Therapeutic Pedagogy will allow you to design intervention strategies so that students with learning difficulties, behavioral problems, or lack of motivation can give their best.