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'A school isn't good enough until it is good enough for our own children. In fact it's not only that it must be good enough for our own children, but it must be the dream school we want for our children.'

H Levin Stanford Prof of Economics

It must pay to keep us happy, Libby Purves TES Published: 17 March 2006
There was an unsettling moment on the BBC Radio 4 Learning Curve the other week, causing a squeak of surprise from the presenter (me) and an echoing squeak from the wider world.
We were discussing the Well-being programmes devised by the Teacher Support Network, in which staff are systematically asked what would make them happier in their work. Answers vary from "better communication" or more coat-hooks, to a service whereby they can get their cars washed during school hours instead of wasting Saturday mornings. The squeaks of surprise were not caused by the car-wash idea (which mainly produced snorts from those of us crusties who hadn't realised that cars were washable). It was a far more serious bombshell that was lobbed: the casually dropped information that in several schools which had taken on the project, pupil behaviour improved.

Read that again: that particular improvement was not in staff turnover, or stress absenteeism, or even teaching standards and Ofsted's. I am sure those perked up too, but what we were told was that by paying deliberate attention to the happiness of the teachers, schools got the pupils behaving better. As one emailer to the programme said "This could be the most important interview ever broadcast on the BBC, don't let it just float by."

If you can’t look after the people that look after the students, then who’s going to look after the students? Carol Lynch explains
SecEd 16th Nov 2006
The new academic year should bring with it a revitalised teaching staff with a fresh vision for the weeks and months ahead. However, in reality the pressures and stress levels in secondary schools mean that this enthusiasm can be difficult to maintain.

Whole Person Education by Linda MacRae-Campbell
Nurturing the compassionate genius in each of us
In Context Magazine, Winter 1988
One hundred years ago, schools were established to teach basic literacy. We have a far greater purpose today. With basic research as a powerful ally, we see new images of what it means to be human. We are learning how to cultivate the vast regions of potential of all people at every age and every ability level. Individual school communities are being freed to create and conduct programs unique to those within its locality. The unfettering of potential at all levels of education comes at a time when global issues demand a new purpose of education. Our new goal can be no less than to nurture the compassionate genius within each of us.

'Why we must educate the whole person'
The Independent EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT, 19th June 2003, p.7
Anita Roddick (Founder of the Bodyshop)
To say that Western systems of education are in a mess right now is to understate the problem. Even a cursory glance at our culture unmasks a growing population who are unable to master basic skills for jobs, let alone engender for themselves an enlightened existence.

In transformation education, we see imagination as more important than knowledge, and that education is about a route that encompasses the mind, body, and spirit - not a collection of computer-like facts, data, memories, and rules. Education should be concerned with the whole being.

What I subscribe to is an alternative school of thought. I see a groundswell happening: people taking charge and ownership of their education, looking for an alternative. I see a growing sense of wanting something different. An emergence of a fundamental shift in our philosophy and practice of education.'

A Sense of Wonder, by David Orr
D.H. Lawrence once said that “Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a
third things that makes it water and nobody knows what it is.” It is magic, the kind that can only be found in nature, life, and human possibilities once we are open to them. What is captured in the images that follow is the kind of education that takes young people out of the classroom to encounter the mystery of the third thing. In that encounter they discover what Rachel Carson once called the “sense of wonder.” And that is the start of a real education.

"The Grace of Great Things: Recovering the
Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning,"
Parker Palmer
keynote address for the Naropa Institute's Spirituality in Education Conference, hosted by Communications for a Sustainable Future (CSF)
The sacred is that which is worthy of respect. As soon as we see that, the sacred is everywhere. There is nothing, when rightly understood, that it is not worthy of respect. . . . How it would transform academic life if we could practice simple respect! I don't think there are many places where people feel less respect than they do on university campuses. The university is a place that has learned to grant respect to only a few things: to the text, to the expert, to those who win in competition.

But we do not grant respect to students, to stumbling and failing. We do not grant respect to tentative and heartfelt ways of being in the world where the person can't quite think of the right word or can't think of any word at all. We don't grant respect to silence and wonder. We don t grant it to voices outside our tight little circle, let alone to the voiceless things of the world. Why? Because in academic culture, we are afraid. It is a culture of fear. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of hearing something that would challenge and change us.

"Standardized Testing and Its Victims," Education Week, September 27, 2000
Alfie Kohn
Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole. (Of course, on "The Late, Late Show," no one ever insists that the monster is really doing us a favor by making its victims more "accountable.") But let's put aside metaphors and even opinions for a moment so that we can review some indisputable facts on the subject.

A New Measure of Well-being from a Happy Little Kingdom
New York Times, by ANDREW C. REVKIN, Published: October 4, 2005
What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money. Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation. But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea. In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or Gross National Happiness.

Happiness and education - theory, practice and possibility
What makes us flourish - and what does not? We explore the theory, practice and possibilities of putting happiness at the centre of education.
Smith, M. K. (2005) INFED:The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, Last updated: June 27, 2005.
Economic growth has been a central policy objective of most governments over the last fifty or so years. Part of their overt rationale has been that by increasing national and individual incomes, people have more choice and the ability to pursue that choice. However, as an increasing number of commentators have identified, the relationship between growing economic prosperity and both individual happiness and social well-being that may have existed in 'developed countries' appears to have broken down (see, for example, Frey, and Stutzer 2002). Shah and Marks (2004: 4) comment, 'whilst economic output has almost doubled in the UK in the last 30 years, life satisfaction has remained resolutely flat... Meanwhile depression has risen significantly over the last 50 years in developed countries'. They go on to argue that many people are languishing rather than flourishing i.e. living happy and fulfilling lives.