Amanda Ripley urges education policymakers to take boredom seriously:
When Gallup asked American teenagers to choose three words that best described their typical feelings in school from a list of 14 adjectives, “bored” was chosen most often—by one out of every two students. (“Tired” came in second, chosen by 42 percent of teenagers surveyed.) And boredom is global. Across 32 countries, nearly half of 15-year-olds said they often felt bored at school on average, according to a 2000 OECD survey. (Ireland did worst of all, with 67 percent of teenagers reporting frequent boredom, compared to 61 percent in the U.S.) …
The research on boredom in school is surprisingly scant—perhaps because boredom, unlike anger or defiance or other, less common schoolhouse emotions, does not directly disrupt the classroom. It is more of a latent virus, less likely to provoke adult interest. “Test anxiety has been examined in more than 1,000 studies to date,” Ulrike Nett and her colleagues noted in a fascinating 2010 study on boredom in school, “yet only a handful of studies have explored boredom.”
The Dish 