ABSTRACT
August Flammer (1990, pp. 144 ff), in his important book on control belief, analyses in detail the concept of secondary control and its meaning with respect to different comparable theories. In general, secondary control means the following: If a person feels unable to change the world according to his or her own wishes, then that person examines the possibility to change himself/herself or to adapt the wishes in question to the given state of affairs. Of course, there are many forms of secondary control, and Flammer thinks that the transformation from primary to secondary control should clearly be distinguished from learned helplessness. What we find less in his book is the application of secondary control to one of the most powerful systems in our culture, namely the school. How does the school as a system develop self efficacy on the one hand and secondary control on the other? What does it mean for a child to feel helpless with respect to that system? What kinds of experiences lead most children to view the system as something in regard to they have absolutely no influence and no control—that is our hypothesis—so that secondary control is the only remaining possibility?
