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The drop-out rate of inner-city high school students causes pain and bewilderment for parents, teachers, and administrators. The youngsters themselves are aware of the self-destructiveness of their behavior and speak about how they “should” get their education, even as they engage in behaviors that ensure they won't.
What the Board of Education attempts to do in this regard has little effect. Traditional training and supervision prescribe that the teacher prepare and impose a controlled agenda, accounting for every class moment. When this fails to keep students goal-oriented and progressing toward achieving a diploma, blame is placed on teachers for not planning well enough, on students for not caring, and on families for neglecting their children. How the teachers are to understand and work effectively with the reality of their students' resistive dynamics is seldom addressed.
To illustrate, at the traditional high school where I taught, youngsters who had failed tenth grade two or more times were placed in “double-holdover” classes. Staff and administration considered work with them a hopeless ordeal. School policy required that this task be rotated, though often it was inflicted on new and unsuspecting teachers or those whom the administration wished to punish. The teacher was expected to survive with a minimum of fuss.
The frustration I felt as a high school English teacher wishing to accomplish the Sisyphean task of keeping all my students in school and engaged in developing themselves led me to seek modern psychoanalytic training. Application of psychoanalytic insight and technique to working with students at risk for dropping out reveals the sources of unconscious destructive impulsivity in these teenagers'