Exploring Well-Being in Schools

A Guide to Making Children's Lives more Fulfilling

John Peter White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136715822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Can we teach others how to lead a fulfilling life? The notion of personal well-being has recently shot up the political and educational agendas, placing the child's well-being at the heart of the school's task.

With his renowned talent for distilling the most complex of philosophical arguments into accessible laymen's terms, John White addresses the maze of issues surrounding well-being, bringing clarity to this dissension and confusion. This accessible book expertly guides you through the conflicting perspectives on well-being found in the educational world by

* Examining religious and secular views of human fulfilment and of a meaningful life.

* Analysing the appeal of celebrity, wealth and consumerism to so

many of our children.

* Asking what role pleasure, success, autonomy, work,

life-planning and worthwhile activities play in children's flourishing.

* Showing how proposals to encourage children's well-being impact on schools' aims and learning arrangements.

Whether you have little background in education and philosophy or are reading as a teacher, student or policy maker, this engaging book will take you right to the heart of these critical issues. It will leave you with a sharply-focused picture of a remodelled educational system fit for our new millennium, committed to helping every child to enjoy a fulfilling life.

Part 1

Well-being and education,
step by step

Chapter 1

Children's well-being in the new millennium

The new millennium has brought a new focus in the UK on children's well-being. Not, of course, that schools and other agencies had nothing to do with this before 2000; but the last decade has seen a step change.

Three developments in the educational world have been:

• The Every Child Matters agenda. Launched in 2003, this is about improving the well-being of all young people from birth to age 19. In 2007 it became a key plank of government policy in the shape of the Children's Plan for England and Wales. Part of this policy has been about what schools, in particular, can do.
• Before 1999, maintained schools in England and Wales had no nationally prescribed aims to guide them. From that year, an extensive list of these was included in the National Curriculum Handbook for Teachers in England (DfEE/QCA, 1999). It states that among the values and purposes that underpin the school curriculum and the work of schools,
  foremost is a belief in education, at home and at school, as a route to the spiritual, moral, social, cultural, physical and mental development, and thus the well-being, of the individual.
  Since 2007, the aims have been redrafted for secondary schools, but pupil well-being is still prominent. It is most noticeable in the headline aim that all young people be enabled to become ‘confident individuals who are able to lead safe, healthy and fulfilling lives’.
• The third development is about promoting well-being through lessons and programmes specifically devoted to it. The most celebrated example is from Wellington College, an independent school in Berkshire. In 2006, its website announced:
  This autumn term, students at Wellington will be the first in the world to start regular lessons in well-being (known colloquially as ‘happiness’).
  http://www.wellingtoncollege.org.uk/page.aspx?id=595

Within the maintained system, in 2008 a new subject called Personal Wellbeing entered the 11–16 curriculum. Like its sister subject Economic Wellbeing, this is now to be a statutory part of the curriculum.

The recent drive to promote pupils’ well-being has been remarkable. Before the millennium, the term ‘well-being’ scarcely figured in the educational lexicon. A decade later, its use is ubiquitous.

Why this change? It is hard to say. Later historians of education will be better placed than us to make full sense of it. Meanwhile, we have to do the best we can with the pieces of the jigsaw we happen to possess.

The trigger for the Every Child Matters initiative was the murder in London of Victoria Climbié and people's consequent awareness that children's services, including education, need to be better co-ordinated around a set of common priorities if such tragedies are to be prevented. These five priorities are that all children should be helped to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being. I will come back to these shortly.

The background to the second development – about well-being as an aim of the curriculum – was growing dissatisfaction with the National Curriculum of 1988. Many thought its intellectualist conception of education, built around traditional subjects, was too narrow. The five ECM goals were also grist to their mill.

The appearance of specific lessons in well-being (or happiness), at Wellington College not least, owes a lot to the ‘positive psychology’ movement inaugurated in 1998 by Martin Seligman in the USA and promoted in Britain by the Cambridge Well-Being Institute. It focuses on the empirical study of factors that make people's lives happier and more meaningful.

Influences from several directions have converged, therefore – from the worlds of social welfare, curriculum reform and academic psychology. All this has happened in the last decade. Why? Is it coincidence, or something indicative of a wider cultural change?

Support for the latter comes from the enormous success of Richard Layard's 2005 book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Layard, as an economist, adds yet another perspective to the three already mentioned, while also relying on psychology. He touched a chord with the public in his claim that greater wealth does not bring greater happiness. His figures show that since 1950,

in the United States people are no happier, although living standards have more than doubled… The story is similar in Britain, where happiness has been static since 1975 and (on flimsier evidence) is no higher than in the 1960s. This has happened despite massive increases in real income at every point of the income distribution. A similar story holds in Japan.

(Layard, 2005: 29–31)

It may be that the new interest in well-being that has typified this decade reveals a change in the zeitgeist – a feeling that we need as a society to draw breath and refocus on what makes life really worth living. It may be that we are beginning to see the shift of concern – from economic growth to well-being – that Keynes predicted for early this century. If so, whether this is an ephemeral mood or proves to be a historic turning point, must be left to future historians to discuss.

What is this ‘well-being’ that has now become so salient? Are the various organisations and individuals concerned with it all dealing with the same thing?

The 2008 UK government document The Role of the School in Promoting Pupil Well-being defines ‘well-being’ in terms of

the five Every Child Matters outcomes that children should be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and enjoy economic well-being.

(DCSF, 2008)

Why should these five items be taken to constitute well-being? The first two, health and safety, look more like necessary conditions of it than constituents. If so, why just these two and not other sine qua nons like shelter, or law and order? Is it because Every Child Matters originated in issues of child protection? If so, has it been sensible for government to rely on the ECM scheme in school policies meant to apply not only to abused or neglected children but also to every child?

As we have seen, the lessons in well-being at Wellington College are also known, colloquially, as ‘happiness lessons’. Is well-being the same as happiness? At a practical level, is well-being something that can be taught in hourly bursts?

And what conception of well-being do we find in the ‘positive psychology’ that has been so influential at Wellington and elsewhere? Is it true that ‘happiness’ is divided into three very different realms – the ‘pleasant life’, the ‘engaged life’ and the ‘meaningful life’? (Seligman et al., 2009: 296). How can one assess how well a person's life is going? Are reported levels of life satisfaction adequate as evidence?

The new school subject, Personal wellbeing has three components: ‘critical reflection’, ‘decision-making and managing risk’, and ‘developing relationships and working with others’. It may seem intuitively likely that these are elements in a flourishing life, but why just these? What is the larger canvas on which they have a place?

Finally, we come to Richard Layard's book, Happiness. Is he right in equating well-being with feelings of pleasure? Can one not be flourishing while sweating away at some problem in theoretical physics in the absence of such feelings?

What these questions show, collectively, is a totally blurry picture of what well-being is. They give plenty of attention to this aspect or that – safety, working with others etc. – but how the bits are meant to fit together is unexplained. This is why we have to turn to philosophy. We need to work through the topic trying to find the best account that we can of what well-being is.

Some of the issues just mentioned come up again in the succeeding 12 short chapters of Part 1. In them I explore the idea of personal well-being in more depth, separating its strands, guiding us through its twists and turns and showing how it applies to what does, and should, happen in schools and families. I do this in the belief that teachers, parents and other educators need an accessible, guided tour to the major landmarks. At each stage of the journey (i.e. in the second part of each chapter), I draw breath and ask what the upshot of the argument is, so far, for education.

Chapter 2

Initial questions

We'll each be around, if we're lucky, for 70 years, perhaps more. We want to have a good life, to be happy. How should we go about it?

It's not easy to get a good view of things, especially in the age we live in. There can be fog on the other side of the windscreen and we may have to go carefully until the road gets clearer.

One reason for the obscurity is this. In Britain, as in many other countries, we live in a society that is becoming increasingly secular but has not fully emerged from the religious world in which it has its roots. This is not surprising. When I was a boy, there were bronze pennies in circulation dating from 1860, the year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. A post-Darwin world is only a few generations old. The Christian world preceding it had been in place for well over a thousand years. It is not surprising that its influence is still strong today.

Take personal happiness. We all want to lead a happy life. Most of us take it for granted that happiness, if it is to be found anywhere, belongs this side of the grave. But a traditional Christian view has been that blessedness must wait till heaven, for those who make it there, that is; the rest can forget it.

This traditional Christianity has taught us that our mortal life is a preparation only. It has no value in itself. This creates a tension in our thinking. Most of us believe that this life is all we've got. It is only here, if anywhere, that happy lives are made. But this is at odds with the ascetic religious message that if people think that happiness lies in the pleasures of food, drink and sex, exercise, good company, having fun, reading novels, going to the theatre, they are deluded. Living a good life on this Earth is not about being a selfish hedonist; it is doing one's duty before God, living in moral uprightness.

Because of this legacy, many of us, religious or non-religious, are not clear how we should lead our lives. We speak of ‘the good life’, but in what way should we take this? As a life of fun and enjoyment? Or a life of moral goodness?

How should we live? For ourselves, or for others? Or for both? We have no settled view on this. The religious, or post-religious, voice inside us says that the best life is the saintly one. The ideal, if only we could attain it, is something like a famine relief worker in Africa, a dedicated nurse in a hospice, a Samaritans counsellor. This is a life well spent – even for a secular person who has no thought of an afterlife. ‘What are we on this Earth for?’ we ask ourselves. And the answer we know already: it is to live for others, to leave the world a better place than we found it, to make some small contribution to reducing the poverty, cruelty, neglect and misery that abounds in it.

Something else within us tells us that ‘What are we on this Earth for?’ is the wrong question. It assumes we're here for a purpose. But are we? If Darwin is right, life is directionless. We are, each of us, the product of millennia of blind change, of struggle, extinction and survival. The goals and bonds of Christianity neither delight nor frustrate. The earthly happiness it has called illusory is genuine after all. The ‘animal pleasures’ it has derided are indeed the pleasures of animals – sex, food, drink, play, domination. And what are we but animals? Where can our fulfilment lie except in activities like these?

Life is short. Rosebuds must be gathered. As long as we have vigour, energy, exuberance, we'll give the joys they bring full licence. Priests have called this our ‘lower nature’, in contrast to our eternal soul. But this is a fairy tale, a nonsense. All we have is a few decades – of youth, maturity and slow decline. Let's make the most of them. Let rooms be filled with song and dancing. Let corks be pulled. Let laughter and loving make our nights too short.

Deeper within there is a different message. This can't be all there is to life. We may be no more than beasts, but some beasts are less beastly than others. What can magpies do but fight and fornicate and scavenge? What can my tom-cat do but hunt, eat, doze in a sunbeam? If we, as human beings, do these things, it is through our own choice, not because we have been programmed to be able to do nothing else. We alone, as far as we know, are aware that we exist. Rabbits can see and hear; mice and starlings can feel pain. Human beings can have these experiences, too, but we alone are conscious that we have them. And this makes all the difference. We are not nature's prisoners. We live and we love – and we reflect on our living and our loving. We have the capacity to rise above our appetites and view them at a distance.

Which means we do have a lower nature and a higher one after all. There is a side to us to which the purely biological story fails to do justice. We are all self-conscious creatures, not in the sense that we blush when we're looked at, but in that we – unlike anything else in the universe, to our knowledge – are aware that we are alive, can remember our past, can aim at goals in our future. We not only have relationships with other people; we are also conscious that we do. We are aware that these relationships have pasts and possible futures, that the webs they make and destroy constitute much of what makes life important to us. We not only see and hear, but can also fashion these forms of perception into the arts of painting, poetry and music.

Which of our voices should we listen to? Our Christian background again comes into the picture. We are dealing with two answers to the question ‘How should I lead my life?’ One looks to our own self-fulfilment, our own happiness; the other looks to what we can do for others. Self-interest versus morality. For a certain sort of Christian, morality is all-important. Our life is built around obligations – to love God, to love our neighbours as ourselves, not to commit adultery, not to lie or covet, to forgive those who trespass against us. Self-concern gets in the way of moral duty. It presents temptations that we must learn to resist. Lust, greed and impatience pull us down towards animality.

It is because morality has been so central in this tradition that we, its secular heirs, have acquired a far clearer idea of what we morally ought to do than of what counts towards our flourishing. We know that we ought to love our children, be kind to our neighbours and help others in distress; that we ought not to lie, hurt people, cheat, steal, kill or break our promises.

By contrast, our notion of personal fulfilment is much more uncertain; and in more than one way. There is no settled view amongst us as to what it consists in. There is also no consensus about what part it should play in our lives in the first place. Isn't a life in which it figures more prominently than in the traditional Christian picture too self-involved, too caught up in the pursuit of self-interest?

Issues for education

This is the first of the Issues for education sections in Part 1. Their aim is to flag up educational questions about well-being arising from the main text. A fuller and more systematic treatment comes in Part 2.

I begin large. Should schools and families bring children up to devote their life to moral striving for the sake of a life to come, or see this world as all there is?

In the Britain or America of 1860, most of them would have taken the first line. Few do today. Yet echoes of heaven-centred attitudes are still heard, especially in our slow-to-change school systems. Schools, especially those for older students, are still places of dutiful striving for the sake of future benefits. The difference between 1860 is that, for most people, the blessedness in prospect is wholly this-world: the joys of university life, a good job, a nice house, a comfortable existence. That is what makes all the hard work one does at school so worthwhile –...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1 Well-being and education, step by step
• PART 2 Education for well-being: the way forward
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• References
• Index