Sloane, a 12-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, is a bit anxious about starting middle school in the fall and wonders if there’s a single word that means “fear of middle school.” There are some long, rare words for the extreme fear of school in general, such as didaskaleinophobia and scholionophobia, or also spelled scolionophobia. More generally, there’s neophobia, meaning “fear of the new” or agnostophobia, “fear of the unknown.” This is part of a complete episode.
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