Reiss, Michael J;
(2025)
Flourishing as an educational aim: the case for school health education.
Journal of Philosophy of Education
, 59
(3-4)
pp. 702-717.
10.1093/jopedu/qhaf029.
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Flourishing as an educational aim: the case for school health education |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/jopedu/qhaf029 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhaf029 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. |
| Keywords: | Social Sciences, Education & Educational Research, History Of Social Sciences, Social Sciences - Other Topics, health education, flourishing, aims of education, sex and relationships education, mental health education, nutrition education, MENTAL-HEALTH |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212685 |
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