ABSTRACT
A book called Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling would not have been likely until relatively recently. Indeed, it has only been in the last fifteen to twenty years that the notions of wellbeing and schooling have been in any way aligned. Education policy makers around the world seem to have determined that wellbeing should be a central part of learning and life in schools; see, for example, the Scottish, Australian, Canadian, Japanese and Finnish curricula. Traditionally, schools focused on subject knowledge, what children might need to know or be able to do in order to function in the world of work. Take, for example, the teacher Gradgrind from Dickens’ Hard Times; he wants his pupils to learn facts and only facts, with no allowance for imagination or creativity, and certainly has no great interest in the children’s welfare. While this character is somewhat exaggerated, it is based on common features of schooling in the nineteenth, and even into the twentieth, century in Great Britain and beyond. If the likes of imagination, creativity and thinking were not encouraged in the classroom, then there is little to suggest that children’s wellbeing would have been of interest. It makes sense to wonder why there has been this shift.
