Apathy, Truancy and Delinquency as Adaptations to School Failure

Three types of deviance are found to be related to English mark. The relationships between English mark and apathy, truancy, or delinquency are shown to be largely independent of these controls: age, sex, reading skill, intelligence test score, occupational level of family, socioeconomic composition of school, and mother's educational aspiration for the subject. Sex and educational aspiration of subject tend to specify the degree of association between English mark and delinquency. Alternative explanations for the strong relationship between school failure and deviance are proposed.