Education for Flourishing

Tyler VanderWeele
Mar 25, 2025
7 min read

Updated: 3 hours ago

Measuring what matters in the classroom.

By Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D.

Key points

Education has tremendous potential to enable students to flourish.
Flourishing is of course enabled through learning and cognitive development.
Education can also help student flourish through formation and character development.

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There has been increasing interest in flourishing as an aim of education. Some of this likely arises from the experiences that many students have of a teacher or mentor who profoundly shapes their lives. Some of the interest in education for flourishing may also have to do with a dissatisfaction with prior models of education, such as human capital models, focused principally on equipping students to produce goods and services to support themselves and society. This is doubtless important, but education can arguably accomplish more. Such earlier models seem to miss the transformative potential of education, and the opportunities it affords to enable students to flourish.

The Scope of Education for Flourishing

While education can help students flourish, there is also a danger of potentially construing the scope of formal educational institutions too broadly. Schools and universities cannot be held accountable for all aspects of student flourishing, and student lives are shaped and flourishing enabled by numerous other non-academic institutions, including, for example, families, neighborhoods, religious and other communities, subsequent workplace experiences, and governments. If flourishing is to be taken seriously as an aim of education, it is important to more clearly specify what is, and what is not, within the purview of a formal educational institution.

In a recent paper in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, we have proposed an understanding of the scope of education for flourishing to attempt to find a middle way between an overly broad understanding that is impossible to achieve, and an overly narrow understanding that does not acknowledge the real potential for student formation. We believe that the scope of the contribution of a formal educational institution to student life might be specified as:

The proper scope of education for flourishing concerns the developing of students’ knowledge, understanding, and the cognitive skills and epistemic virtues that facilitate knowledge and understanding along with the promotion of those aspects of student flourishing around which broad consensus can be attained, and which teachers and educational leaders are prepared to address.

This is a broader set of aims than mere cognitive or professional formation, but narrower than all of flourishing. In particular, not all aspects of flourishing are included because of two restrictions: first, a restriction to those aspects of flourishing around which broad consensus can be attained and, second, a restriction to those aspects of flourishing which teachers and educational leaders are prepared to address. The extent of the first restriction may vary depending on the nature of the school or educational system and consensus may be narrower for a large public school system, say, than a small independent religious school. However, as we’ve argued elsewhere, even within a pluralistic society, we believe there is broad consensus across much of the world that flourishing includes at least happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security.

The second restriction is to those aspects of flourishing that teachers and educational leaders are prepared to address. Preparedness includes psychological readiness but also having the time, resources, and skills needed to promote flourishing. Such efforts could, in principle, range from nutrition and home finance classes to character development programs to opportunities for aesthetic appreciation. Of course, there can be trade-offs in terms of time and resources allocated between fostering well-being and developing students’ knowledge, but research shows that, in general, they are mutually reinforcing. This second restriction is, moreover, not static. It can be altered over time. Teachers and educational leaders can become better equipped to help foster flourishing. Greater resources can be made available to do so. This second restriction is thus not definitively limiting and in some sense is aspirational as it points towards what might be possible with further time, training, and resources. This is especially important if well-being promotion is not to increasing existing inequalities. More disadvantaged schools and systems will, in many cases, need further resources. In any case, we do think that specifying the scope of education for flourishing in this manner can help address some of the objections to flourishing as an aim of education, as indeed we describe in our paper.

Metrics for Education for Flourishing

Based on this understanding of the scope of education for flourishing, members of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard were commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to develop a framework for metrics to assess the contributions of a school or educational system to students’ future flourishing. The full report was recently published in the International Journal of Wellbeing, and a slightly shortened version is available on the OECD website. The report details a number of important methodological considerations, but the basic framework is reasonably simple and resolves around three pillars at both the individual and the school or system level. These three pillars are:

Current flourishing
Academic attainment
Social, emotional, and character-based capacities

A large body of evidence indicates that current flourishing is strongly causally related to subsequent flourishing. Academic attainment itself, of course, enables employment and income but also a host of other outcomes such as social connectedness, happiness, mental health, and the likelihood of marriage. Social, emotional, and character-based capacities likewise have effects on happiness, health, relationships, and other aspects of well-being. And all of these are within the purview of an educational system to influence, and all can readily be measured. But that measurement should extend beyond the individual, and also look at whether schools are flourishing as a community; and whether there are adequate academic curricula and teaching staff in place; and whether there are programs to enhance social, emotional, and character-based capacities, and these matters constitute the institutional pillars of the framework and of measurement.

We are now in the process of operationalizing this framework. We have previously introduced school community well-being and individual flourishing measures, including an adolescent version and most recently a 9-11 year-old version (see below). Existing assessment infrastructure can often be used for the second pillar of academic attainment. For the third pillar in our work with schools, we’ll be employing the VIA Inventory of Strengths for Youth and also assessing quantitatively and qualitatively students’ perceptions of the school’s contributions to their own personal and character development. We are currently in the process of piloting this measurement approach and plan to extend it to many networks of schools globally in the years ahead. We believe this work also has implications, albeit in a modified form, for higher education as well, and that will be the topic of a future posting…

Such metrics for education for flourishing can help us understand what is going well and what is not, who needs help and in what ways, and how things are changing over time. Such measures also help us to assess the effects of educational interventions, initiatives, and policies to determine which are most effective in what contexts, so that we can implement evidence-based practices that promote flourishing for all. Moreover, measurement itself is not a neutral act. What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, what we aim for, and the policies put in place to achieve this. For a school even to take a serious look at how well it is promoting flourishing is arguably a significant intervention in its own right and may provide reorientation towards student flourishing.

Flourishing and Formation

Education is ultimately about formation: formation of the mind, but also of the person and, ultimately, of our societies as well. This is not the work of a single institution, and we must respect the important work of families, workplaces, religious institutions, neighborhood communities, governments, and others in bringing about personal formation and societal flourishing. However, education has an important role to play and we believe that education for flourishing metrics can better enable educational institutions to promote flourishing for all.