Student apathy appears to be just one manifestation of a broader lifestyle and participation of the modern individual in social life. An individual who seems to be limited and trapped in the role of a simple consumer of ready-made goods and a way of life characterized by intense alienation and significant deficits in mental involvement and creative intervention in their world.
The apathy that a child feels while attending classes in school constitutes, in this sense, a structural element of the school system and not merely a symptom of mistakes or shortcomings in its organization. It is the child's natural reaction to the obligation to participate in an activity they do not feel has any significant internal meaning.
Moreover, one can easily see that as attention shifts from the theoretical to the practical field, the interpretation—both of the observer and mainly of those directly involved in the school daily life—of what is happening in school shifts focus from structural causality to individual pathology and responsibility. Thus, the social origin and the social implications of the problem are obscured, ensuring tolerance, at least, toward the alienating institutional arrangements, which thus continue to produce boredom and condition students to a life without meaning.
In student apathy is summarized all the pathology of the educational system as well as the way social pathology transforms into individual one. It represents a fundamental expression of urban hegemony within the school space, at the core of which is the de-socialization of the social, the removal of all social content from the way the person and their world are perceived.
The theoretical approach to student apathy, presented in the first three chapters, is complemented by the conclusions of relevant research presented in a fourth chapter.
