Happiness, Wellbeing and Self-Esteem: Public Feelings and Educational Projects

Abstract

Wellbeing is now firmly part of the lexicon of education and youth policy, deployed as a rationale for many different interventions and inevitably generating mixed effects and meanings. It circulates as a common-sense phenomenon, a set of qualities that it would be hard to argue against, its absence signifying a lack in individual students and also the failure of schools, other social institutions and families to properly nourish its development. This chapter maps the beginning of an historical sociology of youth wellbeing, and asking, “what does wellbeing do?” it looks sideways and backwards to the self-esteem movement in feminist education as a point of comparison. It argues that aspirations for wellbeing are not typically connected to a broader educational and political project of change and are largely indifferent to gender or other forms cultural differentiation. Canvassing arguments about the turn to happiness and public feelings, it proposes that such approaches to the study of feelings in public life suggest productive new ways of exploring wellbeing and self-esteem, underscoring their ambivalent registers and the historically located and socially differentiated form of their subjective address.