Interactions Between Wellbeing and Other Purposes of Schooling in Scottish Policy

Abstract

Overwhelmingly in Scottish policy wellbeing is seen as a means through which other ends can be achieved. The ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ repeatedly asserts that health and wellbeing is a prerequisite of learning, that it supports the development of ‘positive’ dispositions and that it underpins the character attributes favoured in policy. Moreover, health and wellbeing is seen to include ‘skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work’. In Fielding’s (2007) terms, the personal is used to support functional goals.

The converse relationship of learning, as important for wellbeing (or the functional serving the personal) is less prominent. The notion of learning for childhood flourishing is a very quiet theme but nonetheless these references allow the possibility of for alternative understandings of the relationships between learning and wellbeing.

In largely overlooking the educational discourse of learning for flourishing, the policy works the other themes together to provide a consistent message of childhood wellbeing serving other objectives, and inviting an interpretation of a deliberate appropriation of young personhood into the human capital project. Yet, there is a dissonance between this and the welfarist aspirations to which Scotland lays claim. Another reading could be that, somehow, at the interagency discussion table the intrinsic value of education was simply overlooked as an aspect childhood flourishing. If policy was created through the messy processes of borrowing, amending, consulting, and appeasing different interests, then possibly the oversight is the consequence of policy as ‘muddle’ rather than manipulation. This demonstrates how ideologies that serve the purposes of dominant groups can disguise their purposes under the mantle of common sense, so that the individuals may not be aware of the discourses to which they ascribe.