Wellbeing, Flourishing and Catholic Schools

“To educate is an act of love, it is to give life.”¹

Wellbeing has become increasingly influential in international educational policy and literature in recent years. Generally understood in education, this term can relate to a myriad of elements in education, including child development, educational attainment, realisation of potential, happiness, fulfilment or resilience towards challenge. While all of these would be laudable educational goals, the opacity and elasticity of the term ‘wellbeing’ as demonstrated above, means that it is difficult to pin down exactly what is wellbeing and what is wellbeing for. This has lead Bache et al. to surmise that defining wellbeing is a “wicked” problem given the multidimensionality and multifaced nature of the term.² Such is the challenge here that there is an ongoing debate over whether one should write “wellbeing”, “well-being” or “well being”!

One possible solution to the fog surrounding wellbeing in education is to take a lesson from the recently published Global Flourishing Study.³ This longitudinal survey involved over 200,000 participants from 22 counties across six continents, exploring the factors that shape human flourishing. The authors explicitly do not use the word wellbeing, but flourishing. There are several reasons why. First, they argue that wellbeing often becomes preoccupied with subjective happiness or emotional health, while flourishing more fully addresses the multidimensionality of the human person- physical and mental health but also the inner life, meaning, purpose, character and virtue. Second, “Flourishing” emerges from Aristotelian philosophy—specifically, the concept of eudaimonia, referring to living in accordance with one’s highest values and potential, more aspirational and value-laden in nature than contemporary iterations of well-being as feeling good. Third, using “flourishing” goes beyond metrics like GDP or life satisfaction which are often used in wellbeing surveys, instead proposing an integrative framework, giving insights into human dignity, meaning, relationships, and morality alongside material well-being. Finally, flourishing transcends a Westernised concept of wellbeing, enabling a more global understanding of cultural conceptions of what it means to live a good life.

Perhaps it is time that we re-examine our language in this area, moving from a Westernised conception of wellbeing to flourishing, from subjective feelings to a holistic understanding of what it means to be human. For our young, that means enabling them to explore their depths and to identify what their values, identity and sources of meaning are. We seem to pathologize wellbeing in education and talk endlessly about it in policies and focus groups, using programs that are often subject to poor-quality research evaluation, if any. Young people would be better served by educational models that are truly holistic, catering to the multidimensionality of the human person, rooted in relationships of encounter, openness and accompaniment. In other words, educational models that are oriented towards flourishing. Wellbeing should not be an individualist mindset in education; rather, we as educators must cultivate environments where my wellbeing is connected to your wellbeing because we are interdependent upon each other, rather than independent of one another.

This conceptual fogginess aside, if we are to talk about “wellbeing” in a Catholic school, it is then best understood as being intimately connected with the Church’s vision of integral human development, which has become a key concept in Catholic social teaching. Integral human development refers to the holistic growth of the human person not merely in economic or material terms, but also socially, culturally, morally, and spiritually. It affirms the dignity of the human person as being made in the likeness and image of God and insists that development must serve the whole person and all people, fostering their full potential in every aspect of life. Thus, it is a living out of a Catholic theological anthropology which sees the human person as made for right relationship with God and with others.

The term is first used by Pope Paul VI in the 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, who emphasizes “…the development of peoples must be well rounded; it must foster the development of each man and of the whole man”⁴. This understanding of holistic education as inherently relational is stressed by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2009 encyclical Caritas en Veritae: “The development of peoples depends, above all, on a recognition that the human race is a single familyworking together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side”.⁵ In this sense, any iteration of wellbeing in a Catholic school must be the antithesis of individualism- it must be social and communal, committed to forming young people to live with empathy, justice and love. To put another way, in a Catholic school, my wellbeing must be radically connected to the wellbeing of the other.

If we are to conceptualise wellbeing in Catholic schools, then we can look no further that this concept of integral human development to shape and influence our approaches in providing a holistic education. However, perhaps an instructive first step may be to incorporate the language of flourishing into our work. Language matters, and wellbeing at present offers many gaps and opacity in contemporary discourse. Rather than rely on wellbeing, flourishing may offer a more robust basis in articulating the Catholic school’s vision of the human person.