Background

There have been several proponents of the positive account of flourishing as the aim of education, from thinkers such as Brighouse (2006), Curren (2013), de Ruyter (2015), Schinkel et al, (2022) and others. Notably, Kristjánsson (2020) has recently published a major work on flourishing as ‘the’ aim of education. Kristjánsson’s strategy, however, is not to focus on the concept of flourishing ‘proper’ per se, but rather to technicalize and then theorize about it. As Kristjánsson (2020: 1) suggests from the outset, “…this book proposes to develop a conception of student flourishing (understood as students’ objective well-being) as the overarching aim of education”. However, as Mountbatten-O’Malley (2021/ 2022) has highlighted, a) technicalized concepts have little, if any, bearing on the actual use of terms in real life. As such, proponents of technical terms neglect the importance of logical normativity. In so doing, they often fail to recognize the importance of relating new knowledge to the real works and the important conditions for development of meaningful human knowledge and understanding, namely, insight into the complex relations between concepts in use; and b) although well-being is indeed conceptually related to flourishing, well-being is a distinct, episodic concept and not at all conflatable with the much broader, holistic, and longitudinal notion of human welfare that flourishing implies. Even notions of ‘objective’ well-being are susceptible to criticisms of epistemic over-reach, generalization, reductivity, even dehumanizing accounts of ‘knowledge’.

Aims of the event

This enjoyable workshop took place at the PESGB annual conference at New College, in Oxford. It brought together academics, teachers, and other interested parties in education to explore the pressing issues and possibilities for flourishing and education in creative, innovative and engaging ways in order to reinvigorate discourse on the related notions of education and learning, civic duty, democracy, character development, happiness, the good life, and the relationship of these concepts to the common good.

What happenned?

Using artistic & creative methods, we moved into a dynamic set of discussion rounds. we explored the nature of flourishing, the relationship between flourishing & education, and specifically, whether flourishing should be the aim of education.