Spring 2006

Wellbeing and connectedness

Am I a teacher or a nurse-maid?

Brian Hill asserts that personal meaning and a sense of individual purpose are central to wellbeing. He acknowledges that teachers require supportive relationships as values education becomes the dual task of enlightenment and skilling.

‘Once, all a teacher had to do was teach. Now we have to coddle and counsel as well. I wasn’t trained for it, and I don’t get paid extra, either!’ This teacher was lamenting both the growing number of emotionally disturbed children he encounters in his classes, and the fact that teachers are increasingly expected to be active members of the school’s pastoral care team.

Evidence is mounting that disruptive behaviour in classrooms and school yards is increasing, often due to students’ dysfunctional home lives and the unsettling effects of growing up in a culture invaded by competing value systems and media seductions. This is part of the reason that many human service areas are borrowing the term ‘wellbeing’ from the discourse of health science.

Wellbeing is seen as satisfactorily empirical and value-free, as compared to intervention in the name of aims, values, ideals or goals. Yet when dealing with human subjects, the term wellbeing is always value-laden, even just at the level of physical health.

It is no accident that this usage coincides with wide public debate about the core values of our society and how schools should teach them. This debate is occurring on two fronts. One involves protecting the rights and freedoms of individuals. The other involves promoting the further visions and ideals which belong in a thick description of democracy. Both are needed to renew the mandate of the public school in the present debate.

But where does values education intersect with care for student wellbeing? This occurs at those points where one must make inescapable value judgements about what is good for human beings. The area of mental health provides a stark illustration.

In past eras, while incarceration in mental institutions was justified partly as protecting society from people with violent tendencies, it was also seen as a means of providing specialist care that sought, mainly by sedation, to stabilise each inmate’s feeling of wellbeing. Now there is increasing recognition that the mentally ill also need goals to strive for and reaffirmation of their worth as individuals. Wellbeing is a product not just of good diet and emotional stabilisation, but also of constructive motivating purposes.

Human beings are not merely biological creatures driven by basic needs for food, shelter, procreation and protection. They also inhabit a world of ideas and intentions which may—on occasion and for what are seen to be good reasons—even work against the satisfaction of such basic drives. We have all heard and read about people who ‘had everything’ yet committed suicide because they could no longer see any reason to go on living. Indeed, suicide rates in affluent societies are rising. Questions of personal meaning and purpose dominate our use of our biological powers and are not, in themselves, merely biologically or socially determined.

Hence, the term ‘spirituality’ is increasingly used in the discourse of the human service areas. But just as many researchers use the term wellbeing in lieu of owning up to their personal assumptions and values—for instance, when wellbeing is equated with contentment with the status quo in cases where discontent might be a morally preferable response—so it is with the term ‘spirituality’ (Bosisto 2005).

As a university student in the 1950s, I was constantly assured that scientific empiricism had consigned study of the spiritual domain to the cultural graveyard. In the next decade, however, a widespread discontent with both institutional religion and materialistic science provoked the rise of ‘New Age’ discourses that revived reference to the spiritual dimension of human existence.

Admittedly, theories of what actually constituted this dimension were, and still are, diverse. But postmodernism seemed to save the day by valorising the right to follow one’s own star and to define spirituality as pursuit of a private vision. At the least, this has had the effect of drawing our attention back to every individual’s need to have a sense of meaning and purpose beyond mere biological and social survival. Yet although this may appear to absolve us from the need to apply moral criteria to the estimation of spiritual wellbeing, it is a very limited view.

Not only do human beings set themselves goals and visions that are ‘distinctively human’ ( Hill 2004) and go beyond mere physical and social wellbeing, but the spiritual is also a dimension of being in which one’s reactions to other human beings, animals, and the natural environment have moral implications. The point may be made whimsically by observing that we do not apply moral categories to a beaver’s despoliation of trees in order to build dams or the behaviour of a rutting lion in heat, but we do apply them to human behaviour in similar cases.

Besides biological imperatives, human existence operates on two distinguishable but interacting planes of consciousness: spiritual and moral. And both have a significant effect on the total wellbeing of the individual.

Therefore, talk about wellbeing in relation to education, as well as having to account for relevant physical and psychological variables, must also assist students to recognise and pursue their search for a personal framework of meaning (at its most abstract reaches called a world view) and to refine their ability to make constructive, rather than self-destructive, value judgements. Values education then becomes the dual task of enlightenment and skilling.

Enlightenment involves providing students with knowledge of the cultural resources available to assist their search for meaning. It is culpable neglect to leave them in the position of having to reinvent the wheel for themselves, especially when powerful and profit-driven commercial interests are seeking to exploit their naivety at the expense of their total wellbeing. Hence it is important to provide relevant curriculum content, not only through the study of world views and moral values, but also through the study of the assumptions and values underlying each learning area.

Skilling involves equipping students to process this information. Indoctrination seeks to domesticate, education seeks to liberate—helping individuals to interrogate their own cultural conditioning and to critically evaluate the nature and significance of the various life activities commended to them in the curriculum. Much also depends on teachers modelling these skills in their own relationships with the subject matter and with students.

This has implications for the extent to which school systems care for the wellbeing of teachers. You can’t model what you don’t experience. The increasing burden on teachers of having to help disturbed children before it’s possible to get on to teaching them is exacerbated by the increased demand for detailed clerical work in connection with assessing multiple levels of performance.

Enlightenment and skilling are the things schools do best. It then remains for other agencies, particularly responsible parents, caring friends and benevolent community institutions, to provide that matrix of supportive relationships that will prompt students to make wise decisions about the promotion of their own and other people’s wellbeing.

References

Bosisto, S (2005). ‘The Therapeutic Relationship between Spirituality and Mental Health’, Ministry, Society and Theology, 19, 1, July, pp. 27–46.

Hill, B (2004). Exploring Religion in School, OpenBook Publishing, Adelaide.

Brian Hill is emeritus professor of Education, Murdoch University, Western Australia.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au