A new focus for education

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Geoff Mulgan of The Young Foundation puts it well:

“Over the last two decades a gulf has opened up between what education systems provide and what children need. Education systems rightly provide children with skills in numeracy and literacy and academic qualifications. But the emphasis on a set of core academic skills, and a culture of intensive testing, has too often squeezed out another set of skills – how to think creatively, how to collaborate, how to empathise – at the very time when they are needed more than ever”

The need to educate people – adults and children alike – in various aspects of ‘the art of living’ is a theme running through much of my work, and this report (called ‘Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown‘) by The Young Foundation explores some of these skills in greater detail and makes a case for why they matter in our lives.

Although it perhaps focuses more on the benefits of these skills in people’s careers than in life generally (understandable as it needs to be ‘sold’ to policy makers), it contains an interesting overview of topics such as the need for people to be taught to be reslient in facing the adversity and challenges of life.

The lost art of living well

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I have written a brief article to provide more details on the rationale for our not-for-profit organisation Life².

Its basic argument is that we face a range of challenges and pressures as individuals living in the modern world, and if we are to flourish in this environment we each need to be given access to a particular range of life skills and information in our lives. Currently, these are not being adequately provided by institutions in modern society, so Life² has been set up to begin providing them to the general public, and to raise awareness of the need for them in society.

Click here to read the article. Click here for an outline of the organisation and some of its activities to date.

Change for the better

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There seems to be change in the air: not the vacuous, meaningless version of it pedalled by David Cameron and other election hopefuls, but a sense that we need to address some more subtle issues relating to how people see and deal with the world if we are to secure a better future.

We have been speaking to a couple of these initiatives recently with the possibility in mind of collaboration in the future – one is the Movement for Happiness set up by Professor Lord Richard Layard, Geoff Mulgan and Anthony Seldon, which is due to launch in September this year. Another is Citizen Ethics, set up by Madeleine Bunting and Mark Vernon. Check them out – each has its strong merits and areas of crossover with Life², but each is different from Life²’s work of equipping people with the tools, ideas and information to live more self-determined, wise, happy and meaningful lives.

I see Life² sitting in the middle of all this work, pulling together linked issues such as ethics, happiness and well-being – and I hope this puts us in a good place to move various strands of this agenda forward in the coming months and years.

Britain’s unmet needs

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The Young Foundation has recently published an Interesting interesting report called ‘Sinking not swimming: Understanding Britain’s Unmet Needs’. Its findings are summed up by their Director, Geoff Mulgan, as follows:

“Our survey shows that Britain is a rich country but with many poor people; a generally happy country but with many unhappy people. It’s not broken. But it is brittle, anxious and stressed. To the public it is obvious that psychological needs are as important as material ones, that love, care, peace of mind are as vital to a good life as having enough heating or enough clothes to wear. Yet there is an odd gulf between this common knowledge and public policy. Whoever can bridge that gap may win the battle to convince the public that they understand poverty and what to do about it.”

This pulls together some of the themes I have been working on – the need to not only move towards a more just, equal and sustainable society with stronger communities, but at Prosperity the same time the need to build the capacities of individuals to it flourish in their lives. Jerseys See my book ‘Modern life – as good as it gets‘ for more thoughts on this, and Life² for an organisation that aims Dog to begin this process of building people’s Nfl capacities to flourish.