This commentary on Curren et al. adopts an educational policy perspective, arguing that it is important to not only ‘find consensus’ on well-being in education but to consider the ways that education policy supports or inhibits this outcome. It argues that a complex systems approach is essential to moving these ideas rooted in ethics and justice into policy and practice. It advocates a comprehensive cross-sector policy approach that integrates education policies at multiple levels and with policies across other sectors that are significant for well-being. It emphasizes that operationalizing these ideas at scale requires consideration of the research evidence on structural racism, gender inequities, and funding disparities, and it emphasizes the importance of focusing on relationships in educational systems and the need for policy leadership and activism.

Research on well-being and concern over the well-being of students and teachers has grown dramatically in recent years. Researchers and reformers in positive psychology and education, self-determination theory, social and emotional learning, liberal-democratic political and educational philosophy, and neo-Aristotelian theories of flourishing and character education have played formative and intersecting roles in what is now an international movement to promote the lifelong flourishing of students as an alternative to a human capital and economic growth focus for education. This article defends this flourishing-focused reorientation of education policy and practice, using a value-led and evidence-informed methodology. It sorts through the conceptual disputes and clarifies the ethical considerations that should guide efforts to advance the well-being of students and teachers, assesses key claims and arguments, and brings together compatible aspects of the leading philosophical and psychological perspectives on flourishing as an aim of education. It identifies ethically and evidentially justifiable points of consensus on well-being and flourishing in education, presents a consensus model of relationships between educational environments, learning, and flourishing, and concludes with some recommendations for educational policy and practice.

Lately, several key experts have proposed that well-being and flourishing ought to be the ultimate aim of education. To make this aspiration into reality, we need (1) a shared normative vision, (2) a shared understanding of key features of flourishing, and (3) shared flagship indicators to assess flourishing. Normatively, while the aim of education indeed ought to be the lifelong flourishing of the students, promoting it requires recognizing potential trade-offs between students’ current well-being and lifelong flourishing as well as each student’s individualistic flourishing and the capability of the society to promote the flourishing of all. Flourishing itself involves the following three dimensions: subjectively experienced well-being, psychological functioning, and certain foundational capacities and virtues through which human potential is realized. We need consensus around these elements and their lead indicators to transform the abstract aspiration into a trackable target pursued through evidence-based practices by education systems around the world.

This article first describes and then proposes a practical solution to the professional dilemma between the duty of impartiality and the duty of human rights advocacy that many teachers experience when teaching and talking about politically sensitive issues with students. The article begins by presenting an analysis of the source and signification of the tension between impartiality and human rights advocacy based on evidence from research on teachers’ perspectives, the conceptual literature on teaching and learning about controversial issues, and the legal and ethical framework of education. Then, drawing on scholarship on respect for students’ right to freedom of religion, the article advances and defends set of basic pedagogical guidelines for teaching and talking about politically sensitive issues that permit teachers to maintain a professional stance of impartiality without abrogating their responsibility to act as human rights advocates. Key to squaring the circle between impartiality and human rights advocacy, the article argues, is for teachers to strive to remain descriptive in their treatment of politically sensitive issues and insist on high standards of reasoning and evidence while at the same time respecting students’ right to an opinion, no matter how mistaken that opinion may seem.

‘Finding Consensus on Well-Being in Education’ is an ambitious and inspiring work in favor of establishing flourishing as the aim of education in classrooms and schools worldwide. The authors offer theories of action to explain how education for flourishing would be virtuously self-sustaining in its ideal state, how we could transition from current educational policies and practices to those that foster flourishing, and why schools currently impede student, teacher, and social flourishing. This commentary critically examines each theory of action, raising questions about the reasons that schools currently fail to promote flourishing and why and how they might do in the future. I argue that David Cohen’s classic essay ‘Plus Ça Change . . .’ provides important insight into why education for flourishing may take as long to develop and take to scale in the twenty-first century as Deweyan progressive education took (and is continuing to take) in the twentieth century. The kind of education that the authors of ‘Finding Consensus’ are calling for is hard and ambitious work that may take a very long time to get right – even as it is also well worth trying to do so.

As the disruptive effects of COVID-19 on education have prompted conversations about remedial learning and learning recovery, the expectation is increasingly that schools are more productive in less time. This raises concerns regarding potential increase in the use of prescriptive curricula. While critiques regarding the usage of such curricula abound, the lack of clarity about what it is that these curricula do and how they impact instructional processes render critiques too coarse-grained to be of value in both normative evaluations and remedial efforts. To resolve this problem, the authors provide a framework that analyzes what prescriptive curricula entail and how they impact teaching and learning. The framework postulates that prescriptiveness occurs along five dimensions and is a matter of degree along each of these. Subtle differences between how these dimensions and degrees of prescription materialize in individual curricula matter for formulating both targeted critiques about what makes such curricula objectionable and for developing adequate and feasible remedies to undo the harmful effects of prescriptive curricula.

The present study aimed to examine how to improve the effectiveness of moral exemplar-applied interventions based on the pillars of the self-determination theory framework, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Past research has mainly focused on the relatedness and attainability of moral exemplars for predicting motivation outcomes. The data for this study consisted of synthesized data sets from previous studies examining the motivational impacts of distinct moral exemplars and intervention methods. The main syntheses for these data sets used multilevel modeling focusing on relatability, attainability, and intervention methods, corresponding to relatedness, competence, and autonomy in the self-determination theory, respectively, as predictors. In general, there was a significant interaction effect between the attainability or relatability, and the intervention method. Autonomous instruction methods, which support autonomy, were demonstrated to boost motivational outcomes. Implications from this study support the employment of self-determination theory to examine the use of moral exemplars in moral education and were consistent with previous exemplar studies.