Well-being has become one of the hottest buzzwords in society and academia. The reason for its popularity is grounded in real-world concerns. People are not well, especially young people. Most recently, a study found that fewer and fewer young people in Hong Kong feel that life is worth living, a mindset linked to depression and suicide (Hung, 2024). Such research encourages a focus on studying and scrutinizing youth well-being. Thus, the OECD has begun to focus on well-being with a PISA Happy Life Dashboard and Well-Being 2030 Agenda (Rappleye, 2024).
Significant investment has been made in research to study and compare student well-being. Despite good intentions, however, this work is often not conceptually coherent, a point highlighted by Ka Ya Lee among others (e.g. Jackson, 2020). It also simplifies cultural differences and can promote western assumptions about the nature of happiness and well-being, as Jeremy Rappleye and Yukiko Uchida note in their work. This can lead to deficit thinking, as some students are said to perform well-being better or more effectively than others. While we should perhaps strive for what some have described as ‘affective equality,’ there can also be troubling implications for identifying some students as vulnerable and targeting them for interventions.
We tend to think that education is a solution for young people who face challenges in cultivating well-being. But what if it is actually part of the problem? In my new book, Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Practice I argue that we learn our emotions in social experiences, and we should not think of emotions as something that is primarily ‘inside’ of us. Well-being interventions can ask students to work on feeling better, but this assumes that they are unhappy because of something personal or individual. But how can this be the case when increasingly numbers of students are unhappy? Is it a coincidence?
I contend it is not. We learn to be happy or unhappy—or sad or angry, or caring or compassionate—in our experiences within our families, with friends, in schools and other social situations. We know that schools do many things that cause student unhappiness. They test students constantly. They teach students that if they do not perform competitively enough, they will be failures in the eyes of others and will not get jobs that can support a flourishing family. And then we have the audacity to blame students for not being happy about this situation.
If we think about emotions as social rather than individual (as I argue in my book), the situation changes. Societies and schools present challenges to young people. Societies and schools should be part of the solution. That means we should not ask students to ‘get over’ their problems, as some interventions for grit and well-being recommend. Instead, we should ask what a happy school looks like and what a happy society looks like.
I recently gave a book launch for my Emotions book, where many schoolteachers joined a conversation about what we can do to enhance youth well-being today. Many pointed out that they as teachers feel pressured to model happiness incessantly to students, while watching out for any signs of student unhappiness. However, this kind of zealotry can be dangerous. It is okay for students to have bad days, and it is okay for teachers to have bad days. If teachers and students are learning that they have to smile no matter what is happening in the world around them, then schools are definitely the problem. Life can be sweet, but it can also be bitter. Why should we hide this?
Instead of resilient students and happy youth, how about resilient schools and happy classrooms? Schools can do more to help youth well-being than teaching students that it is their problem. How is well-being learned in a community? This would be a great topic for future research for a flourishing society.
Liz Jackson is Professor and Assistant Dean (Research), Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. Her recent books include Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Practice (Bloomsbury, 2024), Contesting Education and Identity in Hong Kong (Routledge, 2021), Beyond Virtue: The Politics of Educating Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Questioning Allegiance: Resituating Civic Education (Routledge, 2019).
