SCHOOL FEARS OF THE MIDDLE SCHOOL PUPILS

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to determine the extent of the manifestation and structure of school fears of pupils in the primary school (adolescents).

Methods. The study uses a list of 52 school fears of M.A. Kuznetsov in the author’s modification. Data processing required the use of descriptive statistics and cluster analysis.

Results. The main school fears of pupils in the middle school are the fear of control or independent work, the reassignment of control work, which will cause the director to find cribs, skip an important control, the fears to prepare worse than everyone, answer at the board, forget about any task, not to go to university; the fears of being ridiculed, finding themselves in the center of the conflict, being alone in the classroom, lack of support for friends and relatives, due to age-specific peculiarities, namely the desire of adolescents to interact with peers, as well as their desire for autonomy and the search for recognition of the value of one’s own personality. The fears that form such conditional groups are most closely related to each other: 1) “fear of a teacher” is the fear of visiting control, a new teacher, dismissing from the lesson, and the teacher as a whole; 2) the group “fear-uncertainty” is the fear of “asking for classmates” and “asking for a teacher”, “expressing one’s own opinion”; 3) the group of “fear of incompetence” – the fears of “feeling” of the cereal in the head”, “the impossibility of expressing their thoughts”, “fear to forget the task”; 4) a group of “fears of checking the preparation of schoolchildren”, which included fears of checking homework and the teacher’s questions; 5) a group of fears of “helotophobia” – it’s fears to be ridiculed and criticism in his address.

Conclusions. The main and most expressed school fears of primary school students are fears of knowledge testing, as well as fears typical of the social situation of development and leading activities in adolescence – fears associated with self-affirmation among peers. Such taxonomic groups of fears as “fear of a teacher”, “fear-uncertainty”, “fear of incompetence”, “fears of checking schoolboy training” and fears of “helotophobia” are established.