Sharing Good Practice
Wellbeing in schools:
a paradox in education
By Mike Lambert
I
was invited to give a 10-minute
SPARK presentation at this
year’s GESS conference entitled
Wellbeing. The topic was chosen
because wellbeing is such a buzzword
in education. It’s the hot topic; it’s fresh
and it has high-profile headmasters
like Anthony Seldon from Wellington
College in the UK extolling its virtues.
And yet a focus on wellbeing in
education is as old as the hills. In fact,
I would go so far as to say that helping
students to understand how to achieve
and maintain their wellbeing is the only
purpose of education.
Unfortunately, however, wellbeing
has recently become synonymous
with happiness. This has significantly
devalued the term and misdirected
our attention to something far
less profound. For most people,
happiness is associated with smiles
but depending on where and when
you live in the world, smiling can mean
many different things. In Ancient
Greece, for example, the verb gelao,
meaning ‘I smile,’ also meant ‘I
deceive’ because if you went around
grinning at people in the Mycenaean
Age, they would be suspicious of
your intentions. Mistaking wellbeing
for happiness loses something of the
depth and breadth of our mission as
educators.
Wind back 2000 years, however, and
the idea of wellbeing was something
far richer. The philosopher Aristotle
believed that wellbeing was something
called eudaimonia, a notoriously
tricky word to translate, but which
equates with something like having a
good spirit or a good soul inhabiting
one’s body. This is a far more allencompassing understanding of the
wellbeing that we should be trying to
foster in education rather than simple
smiles.
Education does not have continuous
lineage from Classical Athens to the
modern age. Mass education, as we
know it, was only invented in Britain
after the 1870 Elementary Education
Act. Its purpose at this point in
time was far more prosaic than the
cultivation of a good soul. At the
time, there was a real risk that Great
Britain would fall behind its European
counterparts, when it came to having
a literate workforce and would thus
lose its dominance in the global
market. Education for all, coupled with
rigorous inspection to quality assure
academic standards, was not a noble
pursuit, initiated for worthy reasons
by honourable men. It was in fact a
vehicle to drive us down the road of
economic supremacy.
Most of our schools are by-products
of this mass education revolution and
not our classical heritage. As such, the
majority of school leaders and teachers
find themselves working in an industry
which fetishizes achievement over
wellbeing. Mass education remains
a means for economic domination
rather than the cultivation of the
soul and measurable attainment and
progress has become our end game.
Do not get me wrong here: academic
achievement is no bad thing. The
ability for anyone to cultivate academic
interests that will feed their soul long
into adulthood is a vital element of
education. In fact, at Dubai College,
we rather pride ourselves on how well
our students do achieve. However, we
all need to be aware that academics
are but one subset of a broader
wellbeing programme.
Michael Lambert is Headmaster of Dubai
College.
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