therefore, concentrates on the development of the private sector, yet – despite the pre-sumptions of private hospitals being com-mercially oriented with patients being treat-ed instrumentally, as R. Fenigsen claims – Dutch hospitals are autonomous, self-con-tained health care establishments, independ-ent of the governmindepend-ent administration.
No objective definition of the term bioethics and indistinguishing it from the word morality as well as inadequate expla-nation of the Dutch healthcare system mod-el make the readers mermod-ely acquaint them-selves with the author’s personal thoughts on this matter.
Justyna Czekajewska
(Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland)
Krystyna Szafraniec (rev.): Barbara Ciżko-wicz, Wyuczona bezradność młodzieży [Learned Helplessness of Young People], Publishing house of Kazimierz Wielki Uni-versity, Bydgoszcz 2009.
When a book including helplessness in its title was published in the 1990s, it drew the attention of everyone who wanted to understand the process of system transfor-mation – as helplessness was one of the most significant mental barriers in its course. When this book is published in 2009 and it concerns youth – it arouses a diff er-ent sort of interest. What does helplessness mean with reference to the generation which is doing quite well in the world that cannot be envied? Having read the first pages of Barbara Ciżkowicz’s Wyuczona
bezradność młodzieży [Learned Helpless-ness of Young People], the reader becomes aware that although the book does not con-cern the relation between young people and the complex world of today, it focuses on an even more interesting issue – school help-lessness. We aspire to be the society of knowledge, we keep reforming our educa-tional system at all levels, and now someone indicates the problem of youth’s helpless-ness in school situations. It is truly intrigu-ing. Unfortunately, the book – although it has a vast empirical base and solid theoreti-cal foundations (the learned helplessness model developed by social psychologists: M. Seligman, M. Rosenbaum, G. Sędek) – is in fact pointless, inconclusive and linguisti-cally indigestive.
Th e author’s main assumption was the argument “that the school is an institution which fails to facilitate young people’s access to secondary and tertiary education” (p. 56). Th is thesis has been verifi ed in empirical re-search, the participants of which were age diversifi ed groups (primary and secondary school pupils, students) and teachers. Th e research – based on the the positivist canon of science – was conducted with the use of a wide spectrum of psychological scales and tests. One of them – which measures school helplessness – was originally developed by the author, and a large part of the book is devoted to the analysis and evaluation of psychometric characteristics of this scale.
Th e empirical evidence was subjected to thorough statistical analysis, which:
1. indicated low but constantly increas-ing (with the growincreas-ing level of
educa-tion) level of youth’s helplessness, higher pessimism ratios than in oth-er countries (among students and teachers), and a high degree of anxi-ety and depression among female students;
2. showed weak correlation between the feeling of helplessness and school marks and the attributive style; 3. helped to build cause-and-effect
models showing that helplessness in the primary school, which infl uences fi nal school marks, is determined by the attributive style; in case of sec-ondary schools it is the stereotype of a teacher, whereas as regards univer-sity students it is the attributive style and the anxiety level. Th e author also pointed out that only in the latter case the helplessness in “school” situations has an effect on non-school situa-tions.
Reading the book breeds ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, one may be im-pressed by the statistical competence of the author. On the other hand, methodological ignorance concerning the operationaliza-tion of the problem may be irritating. Young people mentioned in the title as well as the school context are not the subject of the de-scription at all, and scattered comments concerning them clearly show lack of com-petence. The psychological theories on which the research model is based indicate that the process of formation of the attribu-tive style (and of helplessness) is predomi-nantly infl uenced by processes of learning (acquiring) specifi c thinking habits, which
in turn shape the social surrounding of an individual. Th e author ignores these con-cepts. She designs research which not only fails to provide “situational” explanations of the phenomenon of helplessness, but it also overlooks some variables – which are essen-tial and obvious for such way of reasoning – such as the level of education or the social and professional status of parents, which are an extremely important measure of the style of family socialization.
A lot of important theses in the book, such as the one about “the school as an in-stitution which fails to facilitate young peo-ple’s access to secondary and tertiary educa-tion”, have been formulated without suffi -cient attention to its legitimacy and accu-racy (lack of proper assumptions). Moreo-ver, it is imprecise and vague. It may be understood in at least two diff erent ways. Firstly, it may be assumed that the author meant a situation in which young people’s wide access to secondary schools and uni-versities (i.e. the egalitarization of educa-tion) does not take into consideration a cer-tain objective state of aff airs, which consists in the fact that the intellectual level of youth from some environments is lower than the one required by a school – as a result, young people are unable to meet those require-ments and become frustrated and helpless. Secondly, we may also assume that the au-thor thought about an entirely different situation: it is “the syllabuses and method-ology of teaching” rather than the adopted system principles that are the reasons for failures of a large part of young learners. The methodology and organization of
teaching as well as syllabuses are so ill-con-sidered that they demotivate young people and make it more diffi cult for them to mas-ter knowledge. Helplessness stems from educational off er here rather than from the fact that the youth entering secondary schools and universities has the habitus which does not meet the school’s require-ment, which results in failure and, conse-quently, in helplessness. Th e fi rst option locates the sources of helplessness in socio-cultural and ideological determinants, and the other one fi nds them in educational and pedagogical factors. Th e fi rst one puts the blame on the principles of the school system, and the other one on the adopted syllabus and methodological solutions. Both perspectives are highly interesting and they even complement each other, but we do not fi nd out which of them the au-thor follows.
However, what is the most surprising thing is the fact that the author demon-strates clockwork precision when present-ing statistical dependencies, at the same time failing to explain or interpret them, even in simplest, common-sense terms. In her research, the author seems to be so pre-occupied with the positivist canon of sci-ence and with dividing her analysis into countless variables and relations among them that she becomes helpless herself in the face of the detailed knowledge she has accumulated. She comes up with the follow-ing research conclusions:
• “Place of living, as well as gender, does not diff erentiate the attributive style”. This is the author’s statement. My
question is: Why? How can it be justi-fi ed? We do not know.
• “Students are generally pessimistic”. Why? How could it be explained? We do not fi nd out. Th ere is not a single attempt at refl ecting on this problem in the whole work.
• “Comparing to other countries, Polish measurements bring much worse re-sults”. Why? What determines it? We do not get an answer.
• “Depressive tendencies are more fre-quent among students (especially fe-male ones) than among teachers”. What conclusion might be drawn? What does it say? What does this ob-servation contribute to the theoretical model of helplessness?
• “Th e image of a teacher deteriorates at higher levels of education”. This is very interesting, but it may serve as a pretext for further discussion. More-over, how does this observation relate to the phenomenon of helplessness? We do not know.
• “Th ere is a correlation between school grades and the feeling of helplessness, but it is not strong; and even weaker relations exist with regard to ASQ”. Why? How could it be explained? It is difficult to guess. The author leaves this statement – just like all the others – without comment.
• “The anxiety and attributive style among university students aff ect help-lessness, which in turn influences marks and has an eff ect on non-school situations”. What is the reason for that?
Is it a matter of the incompetence of young people, who have not been properly prepared for studies and are unable to tackle challenges of higher education, or is it the quarter-life crisis – a frustrating prospect of the need for taking up an adult role in life and hav-ing to face the world which does not make this task easy: problems in the labour market, lack of own housing. Th e author does not explain it, either. We do not know what is behind all those observations. Th ey are gathered and dressed in statistical apparel by the compu-ter and the tools of advanced statistics, but what is the author’s explanation? What about her knowledge and interpretative im-agination? Th ere seems to be no trace of them in the work. Instead, there are never-ending calculations, a hermetic language and the author’s arguments such as: “Th e value of kurtosis proves that distribution is slightly flattened in comparison to the Gaussian curve” (p. 126) or: “Th e distribu-tion of the results of the anxiety quesdistribu-tion- question-naire in a group of female and male stu-dents is presented on fi gure 46. Th e distri-bution has a right oblique shape, both for women and men (…) with clear fl attening for women and evident leptokurtosis for men” (p. 144). Th is is it. But what does it say and indicate and what are its causes? Th e main thesis of the work – about the school as a place of failures and the source of helplessness of young people resulting from the popularization of secondary edu-cation – also remains unanswered. Th e au-thor does not attempt to explain why the
increased access to secondary and tertiary education leads to young people’s failures and makes them helpless.
Th e book seems to be erratic: the au-thor fails to combine a number of diff erent issues into a mature factual and methodo-logical formula. The reader receives an “immature” product, with a lot of signifi -cant gaps and understatements, lacking concept. Th e structure of the book is inco-herent, illogical and substantively unintel-ligible, largely due to uncommunicative (lacking content) and inadequate titles (in-cluding the title of the whole book – which is too broad in relation to the author’s ac-tual research interests). It is also not clear what criterion the author followed when dividing the book into chapters and subchapters. Why do some of them have several dozen pages and others are limited to just a few pages? A lot of concept cate-gories and issues are repeated, which makes it diffi cult to identify the principle of content division that was used in the work. Particular chapters lack conclusions, which indicates that the author finds it hard to recapitulate detailed issues she has analysed.
Th e author also falls into a pretentious habit of quoting linguistically spectacular, but factually empty phrases, and presenting them as scientifi c truths. Instead, she could try to reconstruct the arguments of quoted authors, such as, for example, helplessness and its causes in the research of Kwiecińska-Zdrenka, Giza-Poleszczuk or Maorda (p. 9, 15 – 16). Th e author prefers to blindly adopt others’ concepts. Th ere are a lot of
second-hand quotes (e.g. Veblen quoted by Kwiecińska). Th e amount of advanced sta-tistics in the work is so overwhelming that it dominates everything. Th e analyses are so sophisticated that they not only perplex the
reader, but also (which is indicated by the lack of interpretation) the author. And the subject promised to be so interesting…
Krystyna Szafraniec
