School Refusal as an Educational Mismatch: A Conceptual Exploration of Environmental Sensitivity and Competitive Educational Environments from an OMN™ Perspective

School refusal has become an increasingly significant social and educational concern in many developed countries. Existing research has identified anxiety disorders, depression, family dynamics, bullying, and social stress as major contributing factors. However, these explanations may not fully account for a subgroup of children who exhibit high sensitivity, strong empathy, heightened awareness of interpersonal tension, and marked distress within competitive educational settings. This paper proposes the Educational Mismatch Hypothesis, suggesting that school refusal in a subset of highly sensitive children may arise not primarily from psychopathology, but from a structural mismatch between environmental sensitivity and the demands of competitive educational systems. Drawing upon over thirty years of clinical observation in East Asian medicine, together with the concept of Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) introduced by Elaine Aron, this paper explores how highly sensitive children may experience disproportionate stress in environments characterized by ranking, evaluation, social comparison, and emotional pressure. Furthermore, this paper introduces an OMN™ (Oriental Medicine Neurodynamics) interpretation of environmental sensitivity as a functional tendency toward inward-directed regulation, heightened reception of social information, and reduced tolerance for sustained competitive activation. Rather than viewing school refusal solely as a disorder requiring correction, this framework suggests that educational systems may benefit from recognizing individual differences in sensitivity and adapting environments accordingly.