The promotion of wellbeing in schools had become popular in the last decade or so. Indeed, there has been some searching philosophical work written on the subject. Along with self-esteem and flourishing, fostering wellbeing has become one of the fashionable educational projects of our time. The promotion of wellbeing in schools has for some time been part of the policy of the Department of Education and Science in Ireland) with some 400 hours allocated to the area at Junior Cycle at second level.
The initiative is puzzling because teachers have always understood that one of the purposes of school has always been to care for the wellbeing of students. This prompts me to wonder how many practising teachers have contributed to the design of the Irish initiative. The centrality of student wellbeing in teaching is superbly foregrounded in Carol Atherton’s (2024) book Reading Lessons.
The following is the first of two incidents that reflect part of my response to the project to promote wellbeing. At primary school due to the absence of my regular teacher, and distinguished author, the late John McGahern took my class to play football with his class. The next day he praised my classmates and singled me out me as a good footballer. The incident occurred over fifty years ago but the compliment has contributed to my wellbeing through my life.
There was no need for theories of wellbeing at the time. Irish schools, like those in the English-speaking world, have for a long time been conceived as nurturing environments grounded in a broad or thicker conception of children’s welfare than that of mere academic achievement. This is much less the case elsewhere, for example, in France and in Italy. By contrast, in Ireland and in the UK, the school is often perceived as an extension of the home in terms of providing personal support and overall care for young people.
Most schools that I have had the privilege of visiting are warm and caring, where good-humour and laughter are prominent. Especially, but not only, in areas of social disadvantage, schools can allow young people to be children, secure for a while from the world outside the classroom where the demands of a precocious adulthood urge themselves so insistently upon them. Such schools are indeed ‘places apart’ where and concern for student wellbeing is foregrounded.
One of the features of this concern emerges in some research that I conducted into the conceptions of good teachers held by student teachers. Admiration of well-planned and efficient teaching was striking. This is how the wellbeing of young people is best promoted – by giving learners the opportunity to experience imaginative, structured, and committed teaching.
Teaching of such a character is more important than add-on programmes on wellbeing. One aspect of such teaching is careful, consistent, and constructive correction of pupils’ assignments rather than the production of theories about holistic education. I remember well as a pupil the frustration of waiting for ages for feedback on assignments. I recall too from my time as a teacher the eagerness to learn how they had done when I returned corrected work. This kind of caring for the wellbeing of learners is part of what is involved in being an educator. In this I am in agreement with Marcus Elliot in his blog Care. What is it good for?: ‘Assessment is the activity we use to show we care about not only what our students have learned, but also what change in their actions and behaviours that learning entails’.
To be sure, there is also scope for nurturing activities of an explicit character within schools on the part of teachers. In cases where teachers know of some difficult domestic situation, a sympathetic word communicating awareness of the young person’s situation and the stress she or he must be undergoing can often be appropriate.
Before concluding I wish to refer to a second illustrative incident. When I left second-level teaching over thirty years ago, I was confronted by a very unhappy young man about to start Sixth Year who angrily reproached me for abandoning him. ‘I only came back here because of you’. This remark taught me that teachers contribute to the wellbeing of their students in ways they may not even realise themselves.
In brief, I find theories about wellbeing otiose. Fostering wellbeing is like promoting happiness. Wellbeing has always been at the heart of the work of good teachers and the promotion of the area needs to be treated with caution. The practice of committed teachers is frequently a better guide to teaching and learning than what theorists write about education.
