Flourishing as an educational aim

Abstract

Since the 1990s, there has been a spate of influential research defending flourishing as the aim of education. Promoting student flourishing is a key goal of education that extends beyond academic achievement. This approach recognizes the holistic development of students, nurturing their intellectual, emotional, social, and physical well-being. Over the past two decades, we have also witnessed increased practical uptake of this theoretical stance. Educators, schools, and head teachers from all over the world have drawn inspiration from this movement explicitly to prioritize virtue language and student flourishing in their classrooms or adopt a whole-school approach that aims to cultivate students' virtuous characters with the goal of student flourishing and well-being. This is clearly a wide educational remit and one that has been championed and criticized. In response to objections, some of which were recently made, defenders of flourishing as an educational aim ought to revisit their premises and further explicate and defend their claim that education should aim at flourishing. This is precisely what the five contributions to this suite of articles do, making a timely contribution to furthering the debate over how and why education can and should aim at flourishing.