Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

radical enough – it should aim to produce a happier generation of adults than the current generation.
    (Layard 2005)
    As has been widely reported, the teaching of happiness has been championed at Wellington College, 11 an independent school in Berkshire where headteacher Dr Anthony Seldon (who, the school’s website points out, is also a biographer of Tony Blair) states:
    ‘Happiness’ is the contemporary buzzword. Every media outlet is discussing whether it should be an objective of government policy and whether it can be taught. It can be and must be, in our opinion.
    ( www.wellingtoncollege.org.uk/page.aspx?id=2198 )
    The school has linked up with Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute 12 and designed lessons that address related issues such as the relationship between mind and body, between their conscious and subconscious and between their past, present, future and fantasy lives. I am inclined to agree with Dr Seldon. We need to teach children to take the time as well as tell the time. What’s more, happiness is something you take, not something you find. It is like fruit, not air. Our children need to be taught this before they go through their entire lives waiting to be happy. Part of such happiness teaching is to help them understand that, despite adverts such as one I saw for a mobile phone eBay application headed ‘Shop While You Shop’, you can’t buy your way to happiness (happiness by such events is the most transitory type, happiness through relationships is the next best and happiness through having a meaning in your life comes out on top). However, the UK’s biggest teaching union is quick to bring its own particular brand of hard-done-by misery to the joyful proceedings with one of its leaders quoted on the BBC News website as saying:
    Our members recognize the diagnosis but will be concerned by the solution. If schools are going to spend more time on developing ethosand encouraging pupils to be confident and happy then less time needs to be spent on lessons.
    ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6618431.stm )
    Research quoted in the
Scientific American Mind
article entailed exposing students to a funny video clip after learning a list of words. The students who laughed after learning improved their recall by 20 per cent.
    You’ve got to laugh … .

Chapter 16
It might be touchy-feely but it’s still the most important thing you do
    One of the first groups I worked with using the
Philosophy for Children
approach I mentioned briefly in chapter 15 was a group of year nine students at a school somewhere just off the Watford Gap. The head of year had called me into her office one day during one of my visits to the school to ask my advice. She said that, as a school, they felt they knew what they were doing with their gifted and talented cohort and that the troublesome oiks also demanded and received a great deal of their time and energies. She was worried, though, about the ones in the middle. The ‘lost boys and girls’ as she called them. You may know them as the ‘grey children’. Those students in the lesson who never seem to raise their heads above the parapet, who never appear on the teacher radar, who never do or say anything noticeable, the ones you need a photo of on parents evening, you know the ones … .
    I recommended the
P4C
approach and we put together a programme that consisted of a few lessons each term for a year working with me, supported by a friendly and willing classroom teacher. I just felt that
P4C
had a way of getting quiet kids to talk. I was right.
    Over the course of the year, these ‘quiet’ children started to run their own
P4C
club during lunchtimes, held philosophy lunches to which other students and staff were invited, led a whole school INSET session on why they wanted
P4C
approaches in all lessons, went into the feeder primary schools to deliver
P4C
lessons to the year sixes, spoke at a national conference, the first children to address this particular group of
P4C
practitioners, were featured on
Teacher’s TV
and Radio Four’s
Learning Curve
and put together a website about their experiences. What was at the heart of this transformation? I think it was quite simple:
    My thoughts count therefore I count.
    From a sociological (‘Self-esteem, a person’s positive or negative evaluation of him – or herself – has been recognized as a predictor of social problems in the recent research of psychological and social