PSYCHO-SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF SCHOOL ABSENCE AMONG YOUTH: A SYNTHETIC STUDY

Life-long learning is the roadmap for everyone to develop better occupational status, high living standard, and a healthy, peaceful lifestyle. Children should be well formed at the basic education level for them to be able to devote in continuous learning. Of late, how to manage absenteeism in schools has become a major challenge for school managers and the principals. The possible consequences of absenteeism in youth are: they may miss many lessons, they may not understand the lessons, they may fail their grade and finally they will not have enough education and much knowledge for life application to be able to compete with the ever-changing world. In relation to the 2018 World Development Report, the foundation of life-long learning is based on learning through formal education. So, having a basic education is essential for every child. Guided by a systematic literature review, this paper discusses that learning to get knowledge through formal education is getting cognitive skills such as verbal, reading, and writing abilities, mathematics, science, music, and arts, physical and social skills. Attending classes regularly and missing classes are noncognitive behaviors and traits. Finally, this paper highlights that parents, teachers and principals can change the attitudes and behaviors of the youth by changing their surroundings not only with intrinsic motivation but also with extrinsic motivation. Again, they can make use of positive reinforcement, coercive power, legitimate power, referent power, and expert power correctly to gear the attitudes and behaviors of the youth towards a positive direction, with their self-control and social adjustment. Most important of all, this paper identifies that policy makers should lay down the suitable institutional rules and regulations for school absence, implement service programs and associate with other organizations for more social protection.