Teaching happiness is no laughing matter

What is the job of a school? Is it merely to prepare young people for university and work? Or is there a wider purpose? I believe the latter, yet we have seen education in Britain move towards the former.

The content of schools is dictated by government, universities and employers, and none is fully satisfied with the result. School life has become heavily dictated by exams and testing. A broad and liberal education in Britain is being replaced by instruction; open-ended learning is sacrificed before coaching for exams. All schools, including my own, have to march to the drum beat of the examination conductor.

Yet there is a wider vision, in which the purpose of education is to develop all the faculties existing within each child. In these schools, the entire curriculum and extra-curricular life are devoted to identifying, nurturing and developing the eight "intelligences" in every human being - logical, linguistic, sporting, artistic, personal, social, moral and spiritual.

Education is about preparing children for life in the fullest sense. If these faculties are not nurtured at school, they are unlikely to be developed later, especially in those from poorer backgrounds.

Children emerge from school insufficiently aware of who they are, of how to make up their own minds, and what it is they most want to do. We turn out children inadequately socialised to live and work in the world, and insufficiently capable of looking after their bodies and minds.

They are led to believe that the welfare state will always be there to support them and they need not take personal responsibility. No wonder mental illness is so prevalent among schoolchildren, while adults turn increasingly to props such as Prozac - 31 million prescriptions last year.

The job of a good school, as with a good parent, is to help the young stand on their own two feet, become autonomous, and make their way in the world as free moral agents. The welfare state cuts across this ambition. The NHS will prop you up, and the medical professions benefit financially from so doing.

The state will give you a home, a wage and food. It is paradoxical that the teaching of wellbeing and happiness has been attacked by the Right, when it is so clearly directed at helping young people take responsibility for themselves.

The Right sees calls for "happiness classes" as something frivolous and unacademic, yet the evidence shows that where children are calm, healthy and motivated, they become much better learners.

The teaching of wellbeing or "happiness" emerged in the late 1990s from the work of Professor Martin Seligman, when he was president of the American Psychological Association. He asked why so much psychology was devoted to examining illness and aberration, rather than looking at the factors that lead to a healthy and happy life.

From his questioning came "positive psychology" and the teaching of wellbeing at his own university, Pennsylvania, and at Harvard, where it has been the most popular elective course among undergraduates. My own school, Wellington College, began teaching the subject last year, in association with the Institute of Wellbeing at the University of Cambridge.

Lessons are centred on the development of personal responsibility by each child. Pupils learn how to manage their own bodies, minds and emotions, and how to rely on themselves, rather than on other people or drugs, including alcohol.

The aim is to embed lessons and habits that will last for life. Children are taught how to relax when they are worried, how to make the right decision when a variety of courses is presented to them, and how to manage themselves when they feel lonely or low without resorting to pills.

Relationships with others, the greatest cause of both happiness and unhappiness in life, are also studied in detail. The pupils learn how to identify and treasure true friends, and how to avoid relationships which are damaging and destructive. The aim is for pupils to emerge aged 18 not only with excellent academic results, but also as rounded human beings.

It all depends ultimately on what kind of society we want to build. We need a new education debate about the purpose of schooling. For too long, we have been debating the structure of schools rather than their aim. While the politicians have fiddled, schools have descended towards exam factories.

It is the young who have lost out: they accept the schooling they receive because they know no other nor better. It is time that we did far more for our young people.

Anthony Seldon is Master of Wellington College and a biographer of Tony Blair
From The Telegraph, 24/05/07