{"id":1151,"date":"2022-05-19T01:06:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-19T01:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learningwithleong.com\/?p=1151"},"modified":"2023-06-15T23:56:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T23:56:24","slug":"wellness-education-in-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifespan.education\/zh\/wellness-education-in-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"Wellness Education in Schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Research Overview<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Education intended to facilitate wellbeing might be one of the oldest practices of human civilization. At the same time, its execution in formal schooling is quite new and not well understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, the study of wellness is one of the oldest fields. After all, this topic was the explicit preoccupation of figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, the Buddha, Vedic scholars, etc. On the other hand, from another perspective, the field is still in its infancy. I suspect one reason for this is because the modern school is itself quite young (roughly 100-150 years old) and has traditionally prioritized formal instruction in liberal arts subjects. In that regard, it is still somewhat novel to employ \u201cwellness\u201d methods in the school system in any comprehensive or meaningful sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            There is a history of using traditional academic methods (e.g., lecture) to teach general topics associated with health. However, in education circles we have limited experience employing scientific methods to study those outcomes (or seemingly any others associated with wellness). In short, until very recently, \u201chealth education\u201d was not taken very seriously or studied very rigorously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Adding to the complexity, we lack a coherent definition of \u201cwellness.\u201d The result is that the term is either used to refer to a flimsy sense of generalized success, or it is used as a loose synonym for \u201cmental health,\u201d and\/or \u201cphysical health,\u201d in which case we already have extensive research in other fields regarding how to experience success in those areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this has made the scholarly literature on the topic a little insubstantial. In some sense, we know wellness is correlated with academic\/life success, and prioritizing it in schools seems to lead to increased success and personal satisfaction. We are much less clear on how enduring the changes brought about by such instruction might be or exactly what mechanisms lead to that success. We are very weak in our knowledge of comparative\/cross-cultural studies (as noted by some scholars, an enormous percentage of the literature is focused on the US, the UK, and Australia).   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that said, we do know some concrete methods seem to work quite well: meditation and positive-thinking exercises stand out. Wellness curricula appear to be generally successful, though we don\u2019t always know why, how lasting those changes might be, or how they might relate to a more robust sense of human flourishing\/wellbeing (which would likely include, for example, existential and spiritual dimensions as well as something more easily measurable like physical health).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More generally, the research suggests a lot of concerns regarding wellness at virtually every level of schooling and amongst both students and staff. From what we can tell, it appears while some specific interventions seem to have been successful, most schools are not very good at facilitating wellness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going forward, the literature is unanimous in finding wellness, almost no matter how we define it, to be correlated with academic and general life success. On top of that, the idea of \u201cwellness,\u201d or personal development, has become quite trendy with a popular audience. For those reasons, I\u2019m inclined to think that research on the topic will continue at a swift pace and likely yield dividends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This overview will start with some definitional work, move on to a brief history of wellness education in the modern school, provide some examples of popular \u201cwellness\u201d methods, and conclude by gesturing towards the state of the field on the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definitions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n