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Boredom and schooling: a

cross‐disciplinary exploration
a a
Teresa Belton & Esther Priyadharshini
a
University of East Anglia , UK
Published online: 02 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Teresa Belton & Esther Priyadharshini (2007) Boredom and schooling:
a cross‐disciplinary exploration, Cambridge Journal of Education, 37:4, 579-595, DOI:
10.1080/03057640701706227

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 Cambridge Journal of Education
Vol. 37, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 579–595

Boredom and schooling: a cross-

disciplinary exploration
Teresa Belton and Esther Priyadharshini*
University of East Anglia, UK
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This paper undertakes a wide-ranging exploration of the concept of boredom from contrasting
perspectives across different disciplines with a view to informing the pedagogy of schooling. It
notes the rise of the concept in recent times, and juxtaposes diverse views on the perceived forms,
causes, effects and responses to boredom, along the way referring to implications for schooling.
Based on this examination, the paper puts forward the idea that boredom needs to be recognized as
a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity. At the same time, it also
points out that there is room to reimagine a pedagogy that can engage in a more informed manner
with the complexity of the experience and concludes with an exploration of some concepts—
autonomy and control, struggle and flow—which can help in this endeavour.

Introduction
Boredom is generally believed to be experienced as an indefinable feeling that evokes
discomfort, resentment, guilt and bafflement, but also, sometimes, pleasure.
Bertrand Russell accentuated the anxiety that boredom usually engenders when he
claimed that half the sins of mankind are caused by a fear of boredom (Rule, 1998).
A less familiar belief is that it is an inevitable human experience that can provide a
positive stimulus to thought and creativity. Bruner expressed this notion thus:
‘boredom is a powerful phenomenon—a poison to the intellectual in large doses.
And like many poisons, it is rather a benign stimulant in small doses’ (1980, p. viii).
Our readings of the academic treatment of this subject across the disciplines strongly
suggest that boredom is an entirely constructed notion, shaped by disciplinary
inclinations, theoretical impulses and methodological affiliations, not to mention
personal preferences. In this paper we examine this enigmatic concept by setting out
diverse perspectives from the fields of education, psychology, psychotherapy,
philosophy, sociology, literature and cultural theory. Through these often unsettling
juxtapositions, we hope to draw attention to the differences in the disciplinary

*Corresponding author: Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE), School of Education
and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. Email: e.priya@uea.
ac.uk
ISSN 0305-764X (print)/ISSN 1469-3577 (online)/07/040579-17
# 2007 University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education
DOI: 10.1080/03057640701706227
 580 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

discourses that have constructed the concept, as well as explore understandings of

boredom that may have implications for how educators may develop an informed
response to boredom in schooling.

The rise of the concept

According to the Oxford English dictionary, the word ‘boredom’ first appears in
English in 1750. In earlier times, the concepts closest to the contemporary notion of
boredom were acedia—spiritual laziness or sloth—and ennui1 with its richer
psychological connotations (Conrad, 1997). To early Christians, acedia was one of
the seven deadly sins, as it signified a lack of faith, as God was supposed to be the
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object of interest. Displaying slothfulness was about killing curiosity, which was akin
to killing God. According to Spacks (1994), a combination of developments
contributed to the rapid rise of boredom as a concept. These were the decline of
‘God’, at least among secular populations; the rise of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ as central
organizing concepts of life; a growing sensitivity to individual ‘rights’, like the right to
happiness (invariably satiated through some form of consumption); and a rising
consciousness of the psychological, for instance, the focus on ‘inner experience’, on
the sense that people have complex inner worlds (of desire, prejudice, wishes, etc),
making people more prone to examining these sensitivities, leading to an awareness
of emptiness and lack. Healy (1984) adds that the unraveling of certainties caused by
an intellectual understanding of things better left unquestioned has left a
metaphysical void in western civilization, a normlessness, or at least a scepticism
of universal norms, that has also created the conditions in which boredom as a
concept becomes possible and visible. Taken together, these reasons partly explain
the predominantly negative connotations that ‘boredom’ carries today, and the
compulsion to act to alleviate it. We will return to discuss in greater detail the
responses that the concept evokes, after a tour through the differences in some
definitions, perceived forms, causes and effects.

Some definitions and descriptions of ‘boredom’

While boredom is commonly associated with monotonous or repetitive activities
(see Vodanovich, 2003), or having nothing to do, psychologists attempting to
define boredom have emphasized individual experience and perception of a
situation, describing it as: ‘a state of understimulation, underarousal, lack of
momentum, or a lack of psychological involvement associated with dissatisfaction
in the task situation’ (Shaw, 1996, p. 275); and, an unpleasant, transient affective
state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty
concentrating on the current activity (Fisherl, 1993, cited in Vodanovich, 2003,
p. 369).
Geiwitz underlined this perspective when he stated that, ‘individual differences
suggest that monotony objectively defined as an attribute of the situation is less
important than the subjective feeling of repetitiveness’ (1966, p. 593).
 Boredom and schooling 581

The psychoanalyst Greenson emphasizes an affective dimension of boredom

which depends heavily on the experience of time:
The uniqueness of the feeling of being bored seems to depend upon the coexistence of
the following components: a state of longing and an inability to designate what is longed
for; a sense of emptiness; a passive, expectant attitude with the hope that the external
world will supply the satisfaction; a distorted sense of time in which time seems to stand
still. (Greenson, 1953, p. 7)

As we will see later, this is not an unusual understanding of boredom. In fact, the
German word for boredom—Langeweile—means ‘long time’.
Sociologists like Barbalet (1999) have extended the affective aspect, defining
boredom as the emotional apprehension of meaninglessness. Since meanings
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provide context, reference and purpose to actions and life, life is not bearable
without the quality of meaningfulness. Thus, when meaning is absent, boredom
arises and leads the individual towards the construction of meaning.
Our cross-disciplinary trawl through the literature suggests that writers are
often less interested in defining boredom than in distinguishing between its forms
and causes. In the section below, we highlight some contrasting perspectives to
illustrate the different discourses that give shape to this multifaceted yet elusive
concept.

Forms and causes of boredom

A philosophical understanding
For the philosopher Heidegger, the phenomenon of boredom appears in three
forms. Firstly, one can be bored by something. For example, when waiting for four
hours for the arrival of a train in a ‘tasteless station of some lonely minor railway’
(Heidegger, 1995, p. 93), we are held in limbo and left empty, ‘unable to immerse
ourselves in anything: the environment loses the distinct organization that
characterizes active engagement with things’ (Hammer, 2004, p. 283). Secondly,
one can be bored with something. For example, an evening with friends, tasty
food, lively discussion, nothing at all boring. Yet, at the end of the day, when one is
home, there is a realization that one was bored after all with the occasion. In contrast
to the impatient counting of seconds and minutes in the first form of boredom, time
here reaches ‘a standstill, a stasis, from which both past and future are evacuated’
(Hammer, 2004, p. 284). Thirdly, one can be profoundly bored when a state of
complete indifference is reached. Here, the self, ‘who one is’, loses its distinctiveness.
‘It is an emptiness by which we do not expect anything from our surroundings, by
which the world has fallen dead’ (Hammer, 2004, p. 285). Heidegger sees this
profound boredom not as nihilistic, but as a ‘positive refusal’ of the possibilities of
doing and acting, as a rejection of responsibility for one’s own being. Paradoxically,
this condition reveals one as answerable for everything and everyone, i.e., pro-
found boredom produces the possibility for what he calls ‘the moment of vision’,
‘in which the full situation of an action opens itself and keeps itself open’ (1995,
p. 149).
 582 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

Perspectives from the social sciences

It appears that to Heidegger, all forms of boredom are open to experience by all
people, i.e., his treatment of the phenomenon is meant to say something about the
human condition. In contrast to this philosophical stance, the social sciences give
less emphasis to the universality of human experience than to the differences
between the types of situation or types of individual, as we have seen above. For
instance, several writers have distinguished between ‘situational’ and ‘dispositional’
boredom (Vodanovich, 2003), otherwise denoted as ‘state’ or ‘trait’ boredom. This
difference reveals a dichotomy between possible causes of the particular affective
state in question: it could be either a lack of external stimulus or a lack of internal
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stimulus. Further, Bernstein (1975) distinguishes between ‘responsive’ and ‘chronic’

boredom, one a transient affective response to a specific external situation, the other
an ongoing malaise experienced by those who feel bored much of the time; this
‘malaise’ resembles Heidegger’s (1995) third form of boredom. Greenson also
identified a difference between ‘agitated’ and ‘apathetic’ boredom, suggesting, ‘It
seems imperative to distinguish between the boredom experienced by employees in
monotonous jobs, those with an excess of leisure time, and individuals with a lack of
meaning in their lives’ (1951, p. 11). In addition to dispositional and situational
considerations, and in keeping with the disciplinary differences in approaches to the
analysis of the phenomenon, the causes of boredom have also been attributed, singly
or in combination, to two other types of factor: sociocultural–historical and social–
interactional influences. We look more closely at these varied causes in the following
section.

(a) Dispositional and situational causes of boredom

The field of psychology contains by far the largest body of research on boredom.
Most of it, though, is almost entirely limited in scope to two areas—the measuring of
the ‘boredom proneness’ of individuals, and the investigating of correlates of
boredom in specific contexts, such as cognitive failures among military under-
graduates (Wallace, 2003); workplace boredom (Fisherl, 1993); boredom and stress
among fire fighters (Watt, 2002); the relationship of boredom to absenteeism, tenure
and job satisfaction (Kass et al., 2001); boredom proneness among truck drivers
(Adebayo, 2002); and spirituality and boredom proneness (MacDonald, 2002).
Many such studies, according to reviewers Vodanovich (2003) and Harris (2000),
have also been carried out in the US on college students. The Boredom Proneness
Scale (BPS), constructed by Farmer and Sundberg (1986) is the most popular full-
scale measure used. It consists of 28 true–false statements, e.g., ‘I often find myself
with time on my hands and nothing to do’ and ‘I am good at waiting patiently’.
Vodanovich and Kass (1990), carrying out a factor analysis on the BPS, found
evidence of five factors that have an impact on the experience of boredom: degree of
external stimulation, degree to which an individual can generate internal stimulus,
degree of attention, perception of the passage of time, and constraint. Together,
these factors roughly encompass both the external sources of boredom assumed by
 Boredom and schooling 583

much educational literature and the individual perceptions highlighted in

psychological discourse.
Some researchers investigating individuals’ boredom proneness and its correlates
claim that this ‘trait’ is often found together with certain other characteristics,
namely aggression, depression, anxiety, loneliness, dissatisfaction, and poor
educational performance (Rupp, 1997); inflexible thinking, unsociability, difficulty
in completing projects (Leong, 1993); and sensation-seeking, low attentiveness,
deviant behaviour, criminal cognition, lack of motivation, lack of autonomy and
lower sense of purpose (Vodanovich, 2003). Such an approach often suggests that
people with certain ‘personality types’ are more likely to find school or any other
situation boring. It is worth noting that these researchers do not appear to question
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whether ‘boredom proneness’ might be learnt.

By contrast, in literature from the field of education the predominant emphasis is
on ‘flaws’ in educational practices. For example, Reid (1986) has suggested that
boredom is induced by meaningless or repetitive tasks, and Condry (1978) that
abstract or decontextualized activities will have the same effect. Cullingford (2002)
suggests that non-directed moments between activities, or restrictive circumstances,
will result in mental shutdown while waiting, and Woods (1990) that lack of good
quality resources can cause boredom. Cullingford (2002) suggests that abandoning
schoolwork can be precipitated by tasks that are beyond students’ capabilities, while
Moneta and Csikszentmihalyi (1996) point out that work that is not challenging
enough, will have the same effect. Smelser (1989) makes the same point about
moments that threaten an individual’s self-esteem.
However, Hamilton pursued the line that individual differences in ability to focus
attention are important in regulating the continuum of experiences ranging from
absorbing interest to boredom, but that, ‘both the content of what we find personally
relevant or interesting and the attention regulation capacity to pay absorbed,
interested attention are largely developed throughout childhood and adolescence’
(1981, p. 288).
Bernstein argued that, ‘the inability to experience one’s own feelings directly and
intensely is the root of chronic boredom’ (1975, p. 518), and blamed the trend on
the widespread development of ‘a particular form of training for success’ for young
children (p. 527). He believed that it was ‘the early and rigorous expectation of
behavioural compliance when that can be accomplished only by the imposition of
massive repression of feelings’ (p. 528) that contributes to boredom. In educational
discourse, therefore, in contrast to that of psychology, boredom tends to be
attributed to characteristics of schooling, i.e., factors external to the student.
According to some cognitive psychologists, it is the life stage of adolescence
itself—the time when the development of autonomy from adults begins—and the
associated experience of constraint, that is an instigator of boredom (Caldwell,
1999). Schubert (1977) suggests that adolescents are particularly likely to complain
of boredom due to uncertainty about identity and goals. Larson and Richards’
(1991) study of the schooling experience also showed that boredom was not always
related to personality dispositions or to resistance, i.e., boredom was not confined
 584 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

only to oppositional youth. This notion that life stages can engender boredom finds
support in other quarters too. The writer Walter Benjamin maintains that childhood
is naturally a ‘period of boredom and estrangement, of waiting for an unknown
future and accumulating experiences which cannot be understood until adulthood’
(Moran, 2003, p. 176). To him, a child’s boredom holds out the possibility of
fruitful inactivity, stimulated by disengagement from the adult world into greater
awareness of and interaction with his/her own surroundings, through a ‘privileged
form of seeing’ (Moran, 2003, p. 177). Perhaps this is why Phillips, a practising
psychoanalyst, proposes that boredom ‘protects the individual, makes tolerable for
him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it
could be’ (1993, p. 82). So to Benjamin and Phillips, boredom is an important and
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necessary experience that holds a critical edge.

(b) Sociocultural conditions as causes of boredom

While one body of research can be interpreted to indicate that there is an individual
‘personality type’ that is boredom-prone, there also exists a diagnosis of boredom as
a societal-scale experience. As outlined in the introduction, a historical perspective
taken by some literary writers, philosophers and cultural theorists supports this view.
From this perspective, boredom is understood to relate to the subjective
experience of time and thus to the very foundation of modern society and
consciousness (Darden & Marks, 1999). Such boredom can be caused both by
under- and over-stimulation. The repetitive, mechanical rhythms of factory work,
with the regimented, monotonous routine of timetables introduced by industrializa-
tion, as well as the conspicuous idleness exhibited by flâneurs or dandies taking their
turtles for walks in the 1840s Parisian arcades, led to a visible rise in boredom
(Benjamin, 1973, 1999). The accelerated pace of change in modern city life and the
inability to experience it except as a series of fluid and fleeting impressions, also
induced boredom. According to Benjamin, such boredom could be a defence
mechanism against activity and anonymity, a screen against stimuli (Moran, 2003,
p. 169).
Healy (1984) writes of a certain ‘hyperboredom’ as a defining feature of modern
life, one that is born of the ego’s awareness of its helplessness in regard to its
aspirations. This is paralleled by one of writer Saul Bellow’s characters in Humboldt’s
gift, who talks of boredom as ‘the pain of unused powers, wasted possibilities’, along
with ‘expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities’ (1996, p. 199). He too
claims that life lived at the speed of thought intensifies the problem of boredom. The
awareness of the quality of ‘sameness’ to human life, the idea that everyone is
working to a common directive, he says, offends the self-conscious ego, giving rise to
boredom.
The themes of homogeneity and speed (linked to the rise of capitalism) causing
boredom are popular ones. There is a link too, with the view that boredom arises
from meaning that is fully and totally shared, where there is no room for difference
(Darden & Marks, 1999). Sociologists Brissett and Snow (1993) examine the
 Boredom and schooling 585

cultural context of boredom and conclude that it is caused by (a) cultural arrhythmia
when sameness and obsession with speed destroy the rhythms of culture; (b) the
affluence and emancipation of modern life where individuals are unable or unwilling
to create/originate by themselves, leading to a passive spectatorship; and (c) the
decline in the opportunities for uncertainty.
It is not unusual therefore for several authors with this perspective, like Zeiger
(2004), to suggest that boredom is a product of doing too much rather than too little:
One might suppose that all of the technology and all of the information and all of the
busyness and all of the opportunities of our age would preclude boredom. In fact it
promotes boredom. Our society tells us that we need stuff to do, but sometimes we do
so much stuff and have so much stuff that we don’t have any time to think about all the
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important stuff. It is quite possible that the busiest man alive is the most bored man.

All of these interpretations diagnose boredom as a product of modern life.

Bernstein, writing in the 1970s, also believed that the numbers of people who
suffered from chronic boredom, particularly amongst the young, had risen
significantly, alongside increased affluence, personal freedom and technological
advance. Moreover, he suggested that:
… those who suffer chronic boredom usually confuse it with the responsive form,
seeking the explanation for their boredom in the external circumstances of their lives. …
They are often forced to the unhappy and mistaken conclusion that theirs is a boring
world. (Bernstein, 1975, pp. 514–515)

Bartlett, 30 years later, identified a malaise among the American college students
he taught, which he characterized as a ‘fundamentally new and especially virulent
strain of boredom’ (2003, p. 102). Bartlett’s explanation for this chronic boredom
was the decline of politics, community and religion as vital elements of the students’
lives, as well as a sense among them that progress has gone so far that any
adventurous or innovatory spirit they might have enjoyed had been blunted. Jonsson
(2001) also talks of increasing boredom amongst upper class youth in the US. With
more leisure activities and more time, they appear even more alienated from society
and the increase in suburban affluent crime is matched only by the spectacular
nature of such crimes. What emerges is a popular belief across much of this literature
that boredom is a result of a lack of meaningful challenge/struggle that can be
observed at a societal level. We will return to the notion of meaningful struggle in the
context of boredom and schooling in the final section of the paper.

(c) Boredom as an interactional phenomenon

To sociologists Brissett and Snow (1993), boredom is an interactional phenomenon
which can only be understood in an experiential and communicative context. It is an
experience of the absence of momentum or flow, a loss of impetus. It indicates a lack
of entrainment (synchronization with others/social life) and occurs when the future
does not seem viable (is bleak). Sometimes boredom can be experienced in spite of
entrainment when the future is not amenable to control or direction, when the future
is seen as ‘inevitable’, with no sense of authorship. A claim of boredom is an
 586 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

emphatic complaint of being rendered non-social. A study of habitual boredom by

Bardgill (2000) shows how boredom tends to increase when subjects feel they have
compromised their goals and dreams on the advice of others, leading to a state of
stagnation and paralysis. Therefore boredom is a powerful definition of the situation
as well as an indictment of the people concerned.
But boredom can also be used as protection/defence against unacceptability. It is a
display, a form of presentation of self, used to distance or disqualify oneself (because
of inadequacy, lack of confidence, or simply not wanting to belong, or to convey
superiority). Some psychoanalysts claim that boredom may also be affected to cover
embarrassment in social situations (Greenson, 1953; Fenichel, 1953), i.e., it can be
expressed as proof of others’ shortcomings, allowing for self-discrediting activities
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while saving face. Boredom thus also expresses a vocabulary of motives.

From this perspective, boredom is worthy of being analysed in linguistic terms. It
is common for boredom to connote unpleasantness, a term of disapproval, especially
for adolescents with the drawn out: ‘BORE-R-RING’ (Conrad, 1997). Indeed,
blanket claims of boredom by teenagers, could be accounted for by understanding
‘boring’ as a shorthand to label alienating aspects of school. As Fallis and Opotow
discovered, ‘boring’ often stood for a ‘one-way, top-down, unengaged relationship
with a teacher whose pedagogy feels disrespectful because it is not designed to
tempt, engage or include students’ (2003, p. 108). When it thus conveys a deep
disappointment with schooling, boredom can be analysed as related to moral
exclusion.
Viewing boredom as an interactional phenomenon, there is also Goffman’s (1972)
dramaturgical analogy of scripts, roles and performances as meaning-making and as
presentation of self which can be useful in constructing an understanding of the
affect. From this perspective, boredom can be said to occur when drama fails
(Darden & Marks, 1999). When the setting lacks excitement, or when one is
constrained, there is no possibility for production, play and behaviour. Here, even a
ritualized and well-rehearsed script need not be boring if it is meaningful in its
context. Repetition can lead to expectation and anticipation (for example, in
watching the same film twice). Students, though, complain of boring classes and
teachers when their mannerisms, script, props and setting offer no drama. Where
there is no feeling of intention or purpose, there are no clues about when the final
curtain falls.
Our review thus far shows that, though boredom is a common experience, it takes
a number of forms and can arise out of a wide range of factors, causing its
conceptualization to be a complex matter.

Effects of boredom
Moving from the causes of boredom to its effects, a difference in views can be found
again, between those who consider boredom to lead to potentially harmful con-
sequences and a closing down of fruitful activity, and those whose views lead them to
regard it as necessary and potentially constructive as a prompt to new possibilities.
 Boredom and schooling 587

Boredom has certainly been found to be associated with negative affect (Harris,
2000), its signs and symptoms being human ailments (physical, mental, sexual)
(Brissett & Snow, 1993); listlessness, fatigue, depression, anxiety, loneliness,
hostility, vanity and self-absorption, lowered work performance, increased accident
rates, property damage or job dissatisfaction (Vodanovich, 1999).
Although the prevailing construction of boredom in the context of school is that it
constitutes some sort of failure, and despite its apparent salience to attainment, and
the fact that it is a common experience, boredom at school is not an issue that has
been subject to investigation. Doherty (2002) claims, for instance, that most
researchers have failed to address the structures and patterns of interaction that
cause tedium in and dislike of school. We would add that the links between
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schooling, societal changes and boredom have also been largely unexplored.
Research that has found boredom-proneness to be associated with the inclination
to hostility and aggression, sensation-seeking, impulsivity and destructive behaviours
such as substance abuse and pathological gambling (Rupp, 1997; Vodanovich,
2003) would support Scitovsky’s bleak view that those with ‘no work and lacking the
skills for harmless activities to relieve their boredom will relieve it with violence and
vandalism’ (1996, p. 601). On the basis of this belief, Scitovsky further declares that
the most important function of education is, ‘to instruct in the harmless activities of
life so as to divert people from harmful, violent ones’ (p. 601). Recognizing that this
solution too can engender boredom, he adds that the skill of the very act of learning
needs to be learnt. When children enter school:
… without having discovered that learning is fun … they are usually afraid of school,
are bored by it, find it hard to concentrate, and get poor grades they are ashamed of,
leading them to be truants and ultimately dropouts; and all too many of them end up
on the street, engage in gratuitous violence, and join juvenile gangs. (Scitovsky, 1996,
p. 602)

Scitovsky’s prognosis here is in stark contrast to Benjamin’s (1973) and Bellow’s

(1975/1996) investment of boredom with revolutionary potential. Moran (2003),
reading Benjamin, proposes that the experience of boredom is an indication that
something is not perfect or satisfactory, thereby containing the potential to alert
people to possibilities for rethinking their activities and lifestyles.
This understanding of the potential power and use of boredom is evident in a
notable and rare instance of its recognition by an English educational institution—
Summerhill School.2 Summerhill’s current policy statement says it aims to allow
children the full range of feelings, ‘apparently negative consequences such as
boredom, stress, anger, disappointment and failure are a necessary part of individual
development’ (Summerhill School webpage3). Research carried out here by
Goodsman (1992) hints at a complex relationship between boredom and
motivation; students acknowledged their experience of boredom but also understood
it as a ‘signal to change’ (1992, p. 177). Engagement, on the contrary, was seen as
curtailing the potential for change or development.
Schubert (1978), a psychiatrist, demonstrated experimentally that boredom had
the power to exert pressure on individuals to stretch their inventive capacity when he
 588 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

gave study participants generous amounts of time to complete word association and
problem-solving exercises; once all the more obvious answers had been given,
participants became increasingly creative and original in their responses in order to
ward off boredom. Along similar lines, Rude (2001) has also suggested that if
children are encouraged to persevere with a task or subject that they initially find
boring, they may eventually find that their interest becomes kindled. But Mikulas
(1993) points out that while boredom can be caused by low complexity levels,
continued exposure to a stimulus of higher and higher complexity can slowly reduce
the complexity, also leading to boredom. The law of diminishing satisfaction is
crucial in the return of boredom for Darden and Marks (1999) as well.
But most of these authors agree that a certain amount of boredom, by allowing for
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contemplation, daydreaming and imagining alternatives, allows a refreshed return to

activity (Darden & Marks, 1999; Dawley, 2006). Harris’s (2000) study of the
subjective experience of boredom of 170 US college students aged 19- to 56-years-
old revealed that 73% of the participants believed that boredom could sometimes be
positive, especially as an opportunity for thought and reflection or relaxation. This
accords with Kracauer’s (1995) endorsement of the value of boredom to enable an
individual to find some stillness and their ‘self’.
The other benefit of boredom to which claim has been made is as a stimulus for
creativity. This is the view of boredom as a ‘lost art form’ and hence as precious and
productive. Here boredom, with its unfocused, unintentional, unconscious scanning
is believed to lead to creativity and problem solving. This is felt intuitively by some to
be the case, as expressed by Quindlen in positively advocating boredom for children
during free time, rather than constant, scheduled activity, in order to encourage their
creative development (2002). A similar claim is that a lack of boredom, through
constant access to television or electronic entertainment to fill time or a void in
activity, may reduce children’s opportunities for developing imaginative capacity.
The assault on their minds and senses of sight and hearing by a barrage of rapidly
changing scenarios robs children of the space or impulse to engage in the inward
activities of observation, reflection and assimilation of experience, or to invent and
pursue their own pastimes, activities which form much of the raw material of creative
imagination (Belton, 2001).
We may say, then, that boredom has been interpreted as contributing to anti-
social behaviour and school failure on the one hand, and as a stimulus to new
thinking and action on the other.

Responses to boredom
From the above, it is clear that considerable divergence exists in understandings of
boredom and its significance. Hence it is inevitable that responses to the
phenomenon are similarly varied.
For some writers, there is no possibility of the eradication of boredom as it is a
symptom of life itself. Nobel laureate Josef Brodsky (1996) writes that money is no
solution either, as the rich can be very bored—money buys time and time is, by its
 Boredom and schooling 589

very nature, repetitive. But, he observes, poverty’s boredom can also be brutal.
Leapfrogging jobs, interests, lives, and spouses, he claims, cannot relieve the tedium
of life. The only response then, is to embrace it and understand one’s ‘utter
insignificance’.
Yet others, such as Mikulas (1993), call for an active interest in one’s mental
processes. There is though, the constraint that such an approach can engender a
feeling of being compelled. At the dispositional level, Mikulas suggests that engaging
with challenging situations or seeking therapy, and, at the situational level,
involvement in decision-making, can help. Quite a few writers suggest that learning
to lower one’s sense of self importance, can lead to an increase in curiosity, lowering
defensiveness, lowering judgmentalism and prejudices, opening the mind to new
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ways of doing and being. This also echoes Brodsky’s (1996) suggestion to learn
humility and attain a finite sense of self.
In educational settings, a claim of boredom can often be interpreted as caused by
failings of the system or a teacher’s pedagogical style. The questions that Phillips, a
psychotherapist, raises about the predominant adult response to children’s boredom
highlight both the sense of culpability associated with it as well as the unhelpful
reactions it can arouse:
Is it not indeed revealing what the child’s boredom evokes in the adults? Heard as a
demand, sometimes as an accusation of failure or disappointment, it is rarely agreed to,
simply acknowledged. How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most
perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him—as though the adults
have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is
one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather
than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking
one’s time. While the child’s boredom is often recognized as an incapacity, it is usually
denied as an opportunity. (Phillips, 1993, pp. 72–73)

Mostly though, educational writers have assumed that boredom at school detracts
from the quality of experience. However, from some of the literature covered thus
far, one could postulate that while boredom can be associated with negative affect, it
can also contain critical reflective potential and can be a powerful stimulus to
creativity. In terms of schooling and education, it seems that there is a case for
boredom to be regarded as a legitimate and necessary experience. At the same time,
there is also room to reimagine a pedagogy that will engage in a more informed
manner with the complexity of the experience. In the final section, therefore, we
highlight some literature from the field of education that may hold pointers of
relevance to addressing the question of boredom and schooling.

Boredom and schooling

In the literature reviewed in this section writers have not taken boredom as their
main focus or looked for simple solutions to alleviate it, but instead consider a mix of
situational and relational approaches. We focus here on the concepts of autonomy
and control, and flow and struggle, as crucial concepts in reimagining pedagogy
itself.
 590 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

(a) Autonomy and control

Numerous studies conducted with adolescents (Larson & Richards, 1991; Kanevsky
& Keighley, 2003; Fallis & Opotow, 2003; Strong et al., 2003; Girod et al., 2005)
have suggested the need for a greater involvement of students with the curriculum,
the need for room for contemplation, engaging relationships with teachers, meeting
students’ needs for consistency, respect, and personal control.
Writers on early years education have more obviously concerned themselves
with the qualities of autonomy, control, flow and struggle. Patrick et al’s research
(1993) highlighted autonomy as central to developing a kind of immunity to
(learned) boredom. Although perceived competence and control are clearly an
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important influence on motivation, there are nevertheless children who, though

competent, approach learning activities with boredom or anxiety. The study
probed more deeply into reasons for this, looking at another characteristic—control.
Control is defined by Patrick et al. as ‘the extent to which a person feels capable of
producing desired and preventing undesired results’, as contrasted with autonomy
which is, ‘the extent to which a person feels free to show the behaviours of his choice’
(p. 782). In this study, their particular concern was children who were high in con-
trol but low in autonomy, children for whom ‘behaviour and emotion become un-
coupled, specifically, those children who continue to show behavioural involvement
even when they are emotionally disaffected’ (p. 784), and for whom interven-
tions are not usually regarded as needed as they exhibit no outward sign of
disaffection.
To nurture children’s full cognitive and affective engagement with learning tasks
(the antithesis of a certain view of boredom), Patrick et al. (1993) recommend
provision of choice, lack of coercion, respect for children’s own agendas, and
learning activities relevant to children’s own goals. Such an approach would be
supported by the creation of an ‘informational’ classroom environment in which the
child is encouraged to plan his or her own learning, using the available resources,
and participating in his or her own assessment, rather than the more usual
‘controlling’ environment in which the child is dependent on the teacher (Dowling,
1995).
In the same vein, Dweck and Leggett (1988) recommend that children are
helped to develop ‘learning goals’ which have internal meaning rather than
‘achievement goals’ which are dependent on the judgement of others. Exercising
choice is believed to foster self-awareness and intellectual self-control, allowing
children to pause, consider and reflect. As Dowling and Dauncey (1984) suggest,
‘if children are to become both responsible and autonomous they need training
and support from the earliest age and the priority the school places on this aspect
of development will be reflected in its hidden curriculum’ (1984, p. 15). For the
autonomous, intrinsically motivated child, adolescent or adult, educational and
other opportunities are likely to be actively engaged with and enjoyed, and times
when there is ‘nothing to do’ are likely to be interpreted as a period leading to
creativity. Further extending the idea of student autonomy and control, are the
concepts of ‘flow’ and ‘struggle’.
 Boredom and schooling 591

(b) Flow and struggle

Bruce (1991) advocates ‘free-flow’ play as the most powerful means of developing
certain capacities and a will to learn in young children. Features of free-flow play are
that it is intrinsically motivated, presents no external goals or rules, uses existing
knowledge and skills, encourages struggle to master new competences, integrates
what a child knows, feels and understands, and is a process of manipulating,
exploring, discovering and practising without an end product.
A detailed discussion of the notion of ‘flow’ can be found in the writings of
Csikszentmihalyi (2000). He used this concept to denote the state experienced by
an individual when s/he is completely absorbed in an activity that s/he find
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intrinsically enjoyable. Based on a series of studies with rock-climbers, chess-

players, composers, surgeons and others, Csikszentmihalyi was able to identify the
elements of flow as: a sense of discovery, exploration, problem-solving, and
a loosening of ego-boundaries—‘losing oneself’ in solitary activities, or a warm
feeling of closeness to others and a loss of self-centredness in more sociable ones.
The outcome of activities engendering flow is open-ended and uncertain but
potentially determinable by the actor, who is in control of his or her actions and
environment.
Csikszentmihalyi (2000) suggests that flow occurs when an individual’s skills
match or can extend sufficiently to meet the challenges or opportunities
they encounter. It is when a person’s skills are greater than the challenges pre-
sented that boredom is experienced, and if demands outweigh skills, the result is
anxiety. The experience of flow is not dependent on the objective degree of
competence or challenge present, but on the actor’s perception of these. The
creation of flow experiences, though highly valuable to the individuals enjoying
them, is not however, an end in itself in the present discussion; it is the implications
of the capacity of human beings to experience flow as well as boredom, and
how such experiences might be facilitated through educational processes, that is
significant.
Play, Csikszentmihalyi (2000) proposes (in the sense of Bruce’s ‘free-flow’ play),
is the epitome of the state of flow, an uninterrupted process in which children’s
bodies, hands and brains produce immediate feedback that allows them to control
their environment in an imaginative and experimental way, unfettered by the
requirement that concrete results are produced. Yet for children at school as young
as Year 1, play is allowed at school only when ‘work’ is finished. To Csikszentmihalyi
the dichotomy between work and play is a false one. He concludes that the
educational lesson to be drawn from his studies is that:
… one of the most basic things to be taught to children is to recognize opportunities for
action in their environment. This is the skill on which all other skills are based. … A
child trained to develop all the skills of his body and his mind need never feel bored or
helpless and therefore alienated from his surroundings. (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, pp.
204–205)

According to this frame of reference, it is not only what is taught, but how it is
taught that is important. Learning must be made enjoyable. Enjoyment, though,
 592 T. Belton and E. Priyadharshini

should not be mistaken for ‘fun’, just as it should not be confused with ‘pleasure’;
rock climbing and composing, which generate flow for their participants, present
difficulties, but are entered into, in a spirit of playfulness, enquiry and adventure.
Here we see a parallel with Bruce’s (1991) notion of the importance of ‘struggle’ for
young children learning. Thus the notions of challenge/complexity/struggle need to
be integral to education if a dreary boredom is not to become a part of the learning
that schools inadvertently impart.
In conclusion, we suggest that boredom needs to be understood as a complex
human emotion that deserves a sophisticated, informed response, especially in the
context of schooling. As this cross-disciplinary exploration has shown, boredom is an
ambiguous concept because it lends itself to be approached and judged through a
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variety of contrasting perspectives. A simplistic understanding of the term will not

suffice if it is to be recognized and legitimized as an emotion that can play a
significant part in the learning and creative process. Such an understanding poses
substantial challenges to current educational orientations and practices but, we
believe, would be likely to generate more effective learning, greater personal
fulfilment and much less tedium. Schooling would be further enhanced still, if, in the
re-conceptualizing of boredom, the notions of autonomy, control, struggle and flow
were assigned a more central role in informing pedagogy.

Notes
1. Barbalet (1999) claims that boredom is an active discomfort or dissatisfaction with lack of
interest, leading to restlessness or irritability while ennui is an acceptance of/resignation to
indifference, a languid surrender to emptiness.
2. Summerhill was set up in 1921 as a school where discipline and direction were renounced in
order to ‘allow children freedom to be themselves’ (Neill. 1962, p. 20).
3. http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/school_policies_statement.html.

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