Flourishing as an educational aim: the case for school health education

Abstract

Flourishing has increasingly been defended in recent years as the overarching aim of education. Unsurprisingly, it has also been criticized on a number of grounds (e.g. the notion is imprecise, it has not got much to do with learning, it is insufficiently inclusive). In this article, I do not seek to add to the literature about the adequacy of flourishing as the overarching aim of education. Rather, I accept its utility as an umbrella term and focus specifically on how the acceptance of flourishing as at least an aim of education might be of value in determining our aims for school health education and how we might teach it. I choose health education in part because it is a subject that typically has quite low status in the school curriculum but would be likely to enjoy greater standing, and be given more time and attention in the curriculum, if schools took flourishing as an aim to heart. I examine three health education topics: sex and relationships education, mental health, and nutrition education. In each case I discuss what difference it would make to the content and teaching of these topics in schools if flourishing was taken more seriously as an educational aim.