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Chapter 10 - Expressions of School Maladjustment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2025

Moshe Israelashvili
Moshe Israelashvili
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
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Summary

The literature on school maladjustment is too much engaged with its explicit expressions (e.g., school dropout), while only partially discussing its more implicit expressions. It is arguable that school maladjustment can have many faces. A student’s selection of the way to express maladjustment is a derivation of the person’s characteristics, the environmental characteristics, and the broader context within which the person adjusts (e.g., wartime). Thus, the discussion has to address four general aspects of school maladjustment: (a) silent expressions of school maladjustment, the ones that are commonly addressed by researchers and especially by school teams and parents; (b) indicative expressions of school maladjustment, which are the buds of maladjustment and of major importance in the context of students’ educational flourishing; (c) how both the indicative and the silent expressions can be integrated into a flowchart that summarizes the process of sinking into school maladjustment; and (d) vulnerability to school maladjustment as an additional aspect that deserves a different type of preventive intervention: that is, an intervention that addresses the students’ future adjustment to transitions (e.g., from elementary school to middle school)

Keywords

maladjustmentsilent expressionsindicative expressionsprocess of school maladjustmentvulnerabilitymental healthwithdrawal

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School Adjustment
Why Some Students Fade and Others Flourish
 , pp. 319 - 344
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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