Education is essential to building a Society of Personal Well-being. Happiness-oriented schools offer an appropriate environment for children’s quality of life and combine strong academic performance with emotional education, values education, and guidance on how to progress economically.
1. AN APPROPRIATE ENVIRONMENT FOR CHILDREN’S HAPPINESS
In order to achieve an environment in which each child feels comfortable, these types of schools are characterized by the following:
2. STRONG ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
Academic performance correlates with happiness. In fact, the countries that top life-satisfaction rankings also tend to rank among the highest in academic performance. This helps students take advantage of opportunities and options in the future, which will influence their prosperity, freedom, and security, all of which contribute to quality of life.
On the other hand, a society with strong human capital will be more prosperous and functional, which will improve social well-being. For this reason, it is advisable to draw inspiration from the models followed by the countries and schools with the best academic performance, and even try to improve on them. It is also important that academic education be oriented both toward the student’s intellectual development and, above all, toward their future professional life and, where applicable, business life. This includes developing practical skills, such as creativity.
As instructional hours are limited, and the challenge of achieving solid academic, emotional, values-based, and wealth-generation training requires time, these types of schools remove everything that contributes little, such as Latin.
Another key factor in achieving strong academic performance is the quality of the teaching staff, which depends largely on their motivation, talent, and training. Therefore, a proper teacher selection process by schools is essential.
3. EMOTIONAL EDUCATION
Emotional education can have an impact on students’ well-being, especially if it involves sufficient training over the years in the various facets of the person that make up well-being: awareness (meditation), thoughts, emotions, bodily expressions, behaviors, and needs… read more…
Such emotional training includes social skills, such as practicing empathy, cordiality, respect, communication skills, assertiveness, etc. All of that training is enough to produce profound changes in students’ brains. This is one of the best gifts a school can offer them, as it will be useful throughout their lives.
A true happiness-oriented school teaches, from ages 8–10, a subject called “Emotional Education” or “Personal Well-being,” both theoretical and, above all, practical, for several hours a week. The goal is for the student to acquire basic knowledge of personal well-being in primary school, intermediate knowledge in secondary school, and advanced knowledge in upper secondary school. If a full subject is not possible, it would at least be advisable to offer training modules on personal well-being, emotional management, relationship management, etc.
On the other hand, teachers are in contact with their students for much of the day, over many years. Since they have moral authority over them, it is normal that, through their example (or lack of it), they transmit a positive or negative cognitive and emotional world. Therefore, in these schools, teachers (all of them, not only those who teach emotional education) have sufficient training in personal well-being, both theoretical and practical, and try to convey positive attitudes to their students in day-to-day life.
SIGN NOW to ask that schools teach emotional education, well-being, and health!…
4. VALUES EDUCATION
In some countries, there is already a civic or ethics subject in which values with broad consensus are conveyed. A happiness-oriented school provides values education aimed at individual and collective well-being:
A. The ethics of kindness
It includes the following:
Learn more in:
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Likewise, in day-to-day life, teachers raise awareness of these attitudes among their students and refine them with respectful comments whenever they detect behaviors that go against them, such as taking advantage of other children, being aggressive (although this may be justified in legitimate self-defense), being disrespectful (idem), insulting, lying, cheating, failing to comply, not trying to do things well, exploiting others, etc.
Depending on the type of educational institution, greater emphasis will be placed on refining certain topics or others, seeking a balance. Thus, in affluent schools, work will typically focus more on excessive obsession with status and snobbery (or let us call it by its name: “poshness”). By contrast, in lower-income schools, the issues teachers will need to combat will be, rather, lack of interest in studying and progressing, “couldn’t-care-less” attitudes, or deterioration.
Finally, it is advisable to distinguish indoctrination from the transmission of fairly obvious and universal positive values on which there is sufficiently broad social consensus. Children have the right not to be indoctrinated in ideologies, religions, nationalisms, etc., at least when such brainwashing is harmful. What is more, one of the functions of schools must be to counteract the toxic indoctrination they may receive in other settings, especially Islamist radicalization in madrasas (Quranic schools).
It enriches them to be educated (with true and proven knowledge, useful skills, and values that objectively contribute to happiness), but not to have their heads filled. On the contrary, the school’s role is to teach them to reason, to think correctly for themselves, to have critical thinking, and to know how to reach sound conclusions through logic and experimentation. With these tools, they will then choose (or not) in the future the ideological, philosophical, or religious path they deem appropriate.
Read more in:
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5. TEACHING HOW TO PROGRESS ECONOMICALLY
Prosperity has a clear correlation with happiness, so happiness-oriented schools teach and help internalize the guidelines that, based on empirical evidence, have been shown to lead to wealth:
1.- A culture of work, effort, and individual responsibility (which is different from overwork and excessive strain)
2.- Ongoing education and training
3.- Systematic saving
4.- Profitable investment
5.- An entrepreneurial mindset, initiative, proactivity
6.- Perseverance
7.- Clear goals and action plans. Read more in “The Secret of Milene“, “Stories of Zan” and “The Techniques of Personal Well-being“.
9.- A focus on excellence and offering value at a good price… read more…
10.- Innovation, creativity
11.- Networking
Read more about all of the above in:
On the other hand, these types of schools also teach economics sufficiently, especially the economic systems and policies that have proven most successful worldwide in generating greater prosperity, human development, and happiness… read more…
5. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF HAPPINESS-ORIENTED SCHOOLS
They also meet the following standards:
1.- They offer talks and courses to teach parents how to achieve their children’s well-being and support their all-round development. Read more in…
SIGN NOW to ask governments to require a mandatory online course on good parenting!…
2. They are bilingual or trilingual schools; that is, some subjects are taught in the local language(s) and another part in today’s lingua franca (English), learned at a native level, as it has the following advantages:
3.- They seek discretion and balance in terms of identities… lread more…
1 Mission: A happier world
3 Goals:
1. Share scientific knowledge about wellbeing.
2. Encourage people not to cause harm.
3. Promote scientific research on quality of life.
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