Education for Human Flourishing

Core argument: Past education built "an amazing world" but left six disconnects: (1) infinite growth vs finite planetary resources; (2) financial vs real economy; (3) wealthy vs poor; (4) GDP vs wellbeing; (5) what is technologically possible vs social needs; (6) governance vs the perceived voicelessness of many. Technology's implications are "not predetermined" — outcomes depend on collective responses.

Schleicher's formulation, useful for a retreat: success in education today is about curiosity (opening minds), compassion (opening hearts) and courage (mobilising cognitive, social and emotional resources to act) — the antidotes to ignorance (the closed mind), hate (the closed heart) and fear (the enemy of agency).

Core argument: Education's purposes must be recast from employability to flourishing.

Evidence & references:
- Goldin & Katz (2010): education outstripping technology 1900–1975 → inequality decreased; technology outstripping education 1975–2000 → inequality increased.
- Sandel (2020): meritocracy as a "starkly divisive" sorting machine; educational losers form the electoral base of populist politicians.
- Wooldridge (2021): defends meritocracy but concedes recent implementation is flawed — elites engineer opportunity for their children, and merit is measured too narrowly (cognitive skills only).
- WEF Global Risks Report 2024: ten-year cost of inaction — unchecked conflict, deteriorating climate, widespread poverty, a tide of misinformation.
- Bostrom & Ćirković (2008), Future of Humanity Institute: global catastrophic risks spanning natural (supervolcano), technological (synthetic pandemics, anthropogenic climate change, nuclear terrorism) and political (totalitarianism).
- Counterweight: the Foresight Institute's "existential hope"; Pavel Luksha (2023) proposes four domains with urgent challenges for the young — regenerative economy (energy transition), participative governance (citizen-generated data), culture (learning ecosystems for social transformation), and consciousness (collective wisdom, AI-assisted reasoning, integrating insight/empathy/judgement).
- Raworth (2017): future activity lies between a social foundation below which no-one should fall and an ecological ceiling above which the Earth degrades ("doughnut").

The three HPST principles for future systems:
1. Provide opportunity and fulfilment for everyone, respecting and nurturing a broader range of strengths, including dispositions for caring and creativity.
2. Equip people to design and establish the next set of economic, societal and organisational models.
3. Offer new ways of seeing, sensing and interpreting the world that reconcile competing beliefs and values, rebuild meaning and purpose, and restore wellbeing.

Four major accounts of flourishing (via De Ruyter et al., 2022; Kristjánsson):
- Aristotelianism — flourishing as the intrinsically desirable ultimate end; virtuous activity (moral, civic, intellectual, performative) over a whole life.
- Positive psychology (Seligman) — PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, meaning, relationships, accomplishments; all underpinned by character and virtue.
- Liberal (from Locke) — autonomously chosen capabilities; the state creates enabling background conditions.
- Self-determination theory — three needs: autonomy, relatedness, competence.

Table 1.1 — Ancient and modern dimensions of flourishing (adapted from Sullivan, Humanity 2.0, 2019):

Why Aristotle? Two justifications: (a) he places special emphasis on what people should learn in order to flourish, opening up curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, whereas liberal and self-determination accounts are less directive; (b) his 4th-century BCE dimensions correspond strikingly to Seligman's.

Wellbeing: PISA's working definition (Borgonovi & Pál, 2016) — "a dynamic state characterised by psychological, social, physical, cognitive and material factors that enable students to live well." The Harvard Human Flourishing Program (VanderWeele & Hinton, 2024) contributed a study of how education practices in relationships, character skills, health and meaning contribute to student wellbeing. The report is explicit: flourishing accounts relate more to positive education outcomes; wellbeing accounts to positive education experiences. Both are needed.

What we owe to others: Ubuntu ("learning to participate in socio-moral projects that have communal value"); Confucianism (harmonious relationships, empathy and compassion, integrating individual and group in service of community); Buddhism (rejecting individual selfhood; overcoming anger, egoistic craving and intellectual illusions; compassion toward all living beings and the natural environment). MacAskill (2022): future lives will far exceed past and present lives; education must weight their interests.

AI section: Uses the OECD (2019) definition of an AI system. Notes the Australian Department of Education contributed a cross-government synthesis on AI's significance, structured around opportunity/threat in three spheres — individual (relief from humdrum tasks vs erosion of self-worth, identity, meaning), societal (data analysis for mobility/equality vs improper data sale, hidden surveillance, democratic interference, fraud, misinformation), economic (productivity and innovation vs rapid automation and painful disruption). The OECD AI and Skills project predicts AI will eventually be capable of everything humans do barring tasks involving visual input, complex motor movement and the resolution of unstructured problems. Harari on delegated political and consumer agency; Bostrom on recursive self-improvement and takeover risk.

Closing framing (Leadbeater, 2022): students should go to school to become "purposeful, reflective and responsible" people, "who can see what needs to be done and set about doing it."

Core argument: Adaptive problem-solving is essential to acting in the world and to hybrid intelligence (integration of human and machine intelligence). But it will not shift instruction unless assessment changes: "what we choose to assess ends up being the focus of instruction."

Theory base:
- Mumford et al. (1991) identify eight cognitive processes common across problem-solving models: problem construction, information encoding, category search, category selection, category combination and reorganisation, idea evaluation, solution implementation, monitoring.
- Hatano & Inagaki (1986): routine experts (efficiency-honing) vs adaptive experts (flexible, innovative, creative; more flexible knowledge representations).
- "Weak methods" (trial-and-error, hill climbing) vs "strong methods" (deep, contextually-encoded domain knowledge). Chase & Simon (1973) on chess experts encoding midgame situations as meaningful clusters.
- Luchins' (1942) water jug task and the Einstellung effect: habitual reuse of a known solution even when a simpler one exists → functional fixedness (Duncker, 1945). Implication: deliberately interrupt routine habits.
- Kapur (2008) "productive failure": learners who invent their own solutions to ill-structured problems near the "edge of chaos" become more adaptive and creative than those not so encouraged. Error-encouraging settings improve adaptive transfer.
- Warning: "A focus on the acquisition of large amounts of information at the expense of knowledge creation is a recipe for making routine experts rather than adaptive ones."

Framework: Evidence-Centred Design (ECD) — domain analysis → student model + task model + evidence model (iterative, not sequential). Figure 2.2 shows these phases as a cycle.

Competency model (Figure 2.3 / 3.2) — two core interrelated components plus two supports:
- Problem-solving processes: (1) Identify the problem and define goals; (2) Search, organise and represent the information; (3) Explore and test different possible solutions (divergent thinking); (4) Select and implement the solution (convergent thinking).
- Self-regulated learning processes: (1) Devising a plan or strategy — avoiding both "rigid planning" and "vagabonding"; (2) Adapt to feedback and monitor progress; (3) Maintain engagement and positive affect states.
- Domain knowledge — well-integrated, not rote.
- Supporting attitudes — self-confidence, mastery orientation (Dweck & Leggett, 1988), adaptability to novelty/uncertainty/change (Martin et al., 2013).

Task model — three innovations vs traditional items:
1. Opportunities for invention and learning — "invention activities" where students tackle concepts not yet taught; better transfer than tell-then-practise. Scaffolds modelled on the HERA system: Rephrase, Break it-down, Teach-me.
2. Intelligent feedback — seven functions after Wood, Bruner & Ross (1976): engaging interest; increasing task understanding; reducing degrees of freedom; maintaining direction; marking critical features; demonstrating/modelling solutions; eliciting articulation and reflection. Caution: generative AI feedback is richer but opaque.
3. Low-floor / high-ceiling performance tasks — accessible to all, still challenging top performers; "level-up" sequences; adaptive on-the-fly paths.

Three problem clusters (simplified from Jonassen's (2000) 11-type typology: logical, algorithmic, story, rule-using, decision making, troubleshooting, diagnosis solution, strategic performance, case analysis, design, dilemma):
1. Information problems — searching, evaluating, reconciling, sharing. Examples: NAEP SAIL "Virtual World for Online Inquiry" (Coiro et al., 2019); "The Misinformation Game" (van der Linden, Roozenbeek & Compton, 2020), where learners like/dislike/share/flag/comment and see their simulated follower count and credibility score change.
2. Optimisation problems — modelling or engineering a state in a dynamic system. Five sources of complexity: number of variables; mutual dependencies; role of time; transparency of variables/values; multiple levels of analysis with potential conflicts. Examples: Omodei & Wearing (1995) Fire Chief micro-world (performance = inverse proportion of cells destroyed by fire); Inq-ITS virtual lab (Gobert et al., 2013); Micro-Dyn in PISA 2012; PISA 2025 Learning in the Digital World.
3. Design problems — open, ill-structured, iterative, client-oriented; evaluated as better/worse rather than right/wrong. Precedent at scale: the Assessment of Performance in Design and Technology, administered to 10,000 15-year-olds in the United Kingdom (Kimbell et al., 1991).

Evidence model: "stealth assessment" (Shute, Rahimi & Lu, 2019); log-file process data; Scalise (2017) combining multiple-choice responses with behavioural evidence. Reporting: outcomes on a continuous scale (PISA-style mean 500, SD 100) but self-regulated learning reported descriptively via cluster/latent-class profiles — e.g. "engaged learners" vs "confused guessers", with countries compared on the share of students in each profile. Interpretive caveat: inactivity in a log file cannot easily distinguish a reflective pause from disengagement, so all evidence rules require extensive validation.

Recommendations: invest political and financial capital in longer performance tasks; give students choice and agency within the assessment; advance analytics converting digital action sequences into evidence; share innovation globally through collaborative research and open-source repositories of task models.

Core argument: Ethical competence is a general competence, but there is no agreement on what it consists of. Because morality is contested (descriptive vs normative) and disagreement is structural, education should target a competence, not a doctrine.

A notable internal critique: the Tartu authors observe that the HPST conceptual paper "does not engage with Kristjánsson's other works on Aristotle's account of virtues and moral education … nor with contributions from other scholars who have developed the Jubilee Centre Framework for Character Education in Schools" — which highlights moral, civic, intellectual and performance virtues alongside practical wisdom (phronesis) as an integrative virtue, and a neo-Aristotelian model of moral development with three elements: virtue knowledge and understanding, virtue reasoning, virtue practice.

Definitions:
- Descriptive ethics/morality — codes of conduct established by a society, group or individual.
- Normative ethics/morality — a code of conduct that rational individuals, under specified conditions, would universally endorse (Gert & Gert, 2020).

Three normative families (Walker & Lovat, 2018): deontological (duties, universal principles); teleological (maximising benefits); virtue ethics (balance through the virtuous mean).

Four sources of moral disagreement (Sutrop, 2020): incommensurable fundamental values; different concepts of the good life; different motivating reasons; different concepts of morality.

Tools for tractability: Marino's (2015) "case consistency" (judging similar cases similarly, avoiding arbitrary distinctions); principled prioritisation of values such as fairness and benevolence; "common morality" (Beauchamp & Childress, 1979); agreement on universally undesirable values as a basis for coexistence (Berlin).

Estonian curriculum context: 8 general competences, cross-curricular and cross-disciplinary. The National Curriculum for Basic Schools (2023) defines cultural and value competence as "the ability to evaluate human relations and activities from the standpoint of generally accepted moral norms; to sense and value one's ties with other people, the society, nature, the cultural heritage of one's own country and nation and those of others, and events in contemporary culture; to value creativity and shape a sense of aesthetics; to value general human and societal values, to value human, cultural and natural diversity; to acknowledge one's value judgements." Criticised for vagueness ("generally accepted moral norms"), overemphasis on individual values, and silence on how to cultivate ethical competence.

Figure 2.7 — Proposed model of general competences: ethical competence should complement value and cultural competence; aesthetic competence should be separated out (it extends beyond valuing to creating beauty); and communication competence — currently only a field-specific competence in Estonia — is a prerequisite, because value debates require listening to dissent, arguing constructively, and negotiating shared understandings.

Framework: Five sub-competences of ethical competence (Figure 2.8 / 3.3) — explicitly non-linear:

Supporting concepts: ethical sensitivity (Weaver, 2007), ethical awareness (Rest, 1986), moral imagination (Clarkeburn; Johnson; Werhane; Adam Smith's impartial spectator), and the pathologies "moral myopia" (a distortion of moral vision preventing moral issues from coming into focus) and "moral muteness" (people stop talking about moral issues) — Drumwright & Murphy, 2004.

Illustrative case ("Anna"): habituated to unequal treatment at work, Anna cannot perceive it ethically in situ, yet reasons well about a fictional analogue; separately she judges that lying about a depression diagnosis is wrong but acts otherwise. This is the report's demonstration that the five sub-competences do not run in a line.

Practical tools recommended: Potter's Box (identify facts, values, principles, loyalties); case analysis for consistency; ethical theories (Kantian, consequentialist, virtue); dilemma games — e.g. Estonian "values games" (analyse options, choose, justify, listen, seek consensus). Pedagogies: awareness training, role-play and scenarios, reflection practices, case studies, scenario-building from different actors' viewpoints, debate, collaborative projects.

Recommendations: treat ethical decision-making and ethical reasoning as sub-competences (not synonyms for the whole); address ethical competence across the three spheres of work life, civic life and personal life; recognise its dependence on value, cultural and communicative competence — "Without the ability to listen, understand, and articulate values and moral disagreements, human flourishing cannot be achieved." A taxonomy of levels is needed but is outside the paper's scope.

Core argument: Aesthetic appreciation — of nature and the arts, local and global — is a genuine competence, learnable, expandable and assessable, and is education's route to Gardner's third virtue, beauty (alongside truth/science and goodness/ethics).

Key data point: In 2023, an average of 11% of curriculum time in primary education and 7% in secondary across OECD countries was devoted to the arts — "relatively stable over the past decades with a modest increase of 1% compared to 2017 at both levels." Averages may mask significant within-country variation, notably in federal systems.

Definition (the report's own): "the ability to create, observe carefully, analyse, understand, experience and value the beauty found in nature and in various forms of human creation, such as art, across different cultures and world regions, based on the knowledge and practice of different art forms."
Gardner's criteria for an aesthetic experience: it must be interesting, memorable, and worth revisiting — a "tingle" that elicits an audible "Ha".
Greene et al.'s three-way distinction: art appreciation (knowledge/understanding of art forms) vs aesthetic education (active awareness of the sensuous world — "whether in a work of art, on a sidewalk, in the woods, or when looking out one's window") vs arts education (developing technical skills through creating/copying works).

Five rationales for the competence: (1) holistic education / rounded persons — no society has ever lacked art; (2) meaning and agency — Scarry's "beauty is sacred"; Nehamas on not-knowing driving re-engagement; Dewey's aesthetic experience as dynamic and incomplete; (3) political — Arendt: works of art give us "a stable world to inhabit"; explicit reference to the destruction of Palmyra in 2015–17; (4) social/equity — children from lower socio-economic backgrounds have far less access to high arts and to the wonders of nature, so schools must supply it; (5) economic — vocations, creative industries, sophisticated cultural consumers. Cited evidence: "there is strong evidence that playing short drama scenes increases reading skills" (Winner, Goldstein & Vincent-Lancrin, 2013).

Competency components:
- Content knowledge — performing and fine arts including digital art, places of natural beauty, historical/contemporary milestones, vocabulary for art, nature and the emotions they express.
- Procedural knowledge — practice in art forms; mostly making one's own pieces, some copying; photography/video for nature.
- Creativity — making novel pieces applying one's own ideas to meet pre-set constraints.
- Critical thinking — articulating a reasoned judgment about beauty after careful observation and analysis of composition and expression, situating the work in genre and in artistic/cultural/historical context, identifying strengths and weaknesses.
- Communication and Collaboration.
- Attitudes: Openness; Cultural and historical sensitivity; Disinterested engagement (Kantian — appreciating something for its own sake).
- Value: International awareness and care — thinking globally as well as locally.

Assessment: Priority is sound formative assessment with common standards across teachers. Named models:
- PROPEL "processfolio" (Harvard Project Zero) — production, perception, reflection; portfolio covering all stages from first drafts to final product plus a reflective journal; summative rubric with shared criteria, one of which is the "capacity to make discriminations in works from a wide variety of genres, cultures and historical periods."
- AP Studio Art (College Board) — portfolio evaluated by two to three teachers, then harmonised.
- NAEP arts assessment — arts included 1970, 1975, then 1997, 2008, 2016 (programme stopped assessing many subjects in 2019); constructs: observing, describing, analysing, evaluating — plus a creation task (e.g. a self-portrait scored for detail, compositional elements and use of varied materials).
- OECD CERI arts assessment (Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019) — international, music and visual arts, primary and secondary. Because western notation could not be assumed, it assessed perception of key elements, vocabulary, intended expression and general knowledge of how genres function, using Ligeti and Reich, Brazilian pop, Arabic traditional music, and works including Douanier Rousseau. "The test was enjoyable to the children who took it."
- Also cited: resources/standards in New South Wales (Australia) and New York City.

Verdict on measurability: these examples "answer possible concerns that Education for human flourishing learning outcomes could not be measured." Whether a standardised assessment is desirable is a separate question — a jurisdictional "report card" could instead be built by randomly sampling teacher-based assessments and student portfolios.

Core argument: Restore meaning by teaching young people to understand, respect and synthesise competing worldviews.

Key statistics (the report's sharpest wellbeing data):
- Between 2010 and 2015, the incidence of depression among US teenagers more than doubled; Haidt (2024) reports similar trends across 37 countries, arguing Gen Z (born after 1995) has been "inadequately protected from the virtual world and excessively protected from the real world."
- In the US in 2022, Gen Z (then 18–25) reported lower wellbeing on all dimensions than any other age group; a lack of meaning, purpose and direction was the primary driver (Weissbourd et al., 2023).
- 45% of young adult respondents said that "things seem to be falling apart", citing gun violence, climate change and the incompetence or corruption of political leaders.

Three source streams: OECD PISA 2018 Global Competence assessment; Andersen's Metamodernity (2019); Perlmutter, Campbell & MacCoun's Third Millennium Thinking (2024).

Definitional shift from Global Competence. PISA's globally competent individual (1) examines global and intercultural issues; (2) understands and appreciates different perspectives and worldviews; (3) interacts successfully with others; (4) takes responsible action toward sustainability and collective wellbeing. Understanding the world keeps (1) and reframes (2) as "understand, appreciate and synthesise" — (3) and (4) are moved to Acting in the world. It also goes further: it assumes many young people have lost sight of their own cultures and perspectives.

Table 2.1 — Andersen's four worldviews (the single most retreat-usable table in the report):

Meta modernity (quoted): "integrating the emancipatory elements of indigenous, pre-modern, modern and post-modern cultural codes into one connected whole… On their own, none of the codes is sufficiently complex to handle our current and future reality. Indigenous code can only regulate small, intimate groups, pre-modernity does not offer individual freedom and democracy, modernity is reductionist and cannot see its own shortcomings and post-modernity leaves society with identity politics based on subjective sentiments." Andersen's image: an archipelago of islands of understanding linked by bridges — not a once-and-for-all fusion.

Third Millennium Thinking — five shifts for science:
- From factual thinking → probabilistic thinking
- From "reductionism is all" → a multilevel, nuanced view including emergent phenomena
- From masterstroke solutions → iterative solutions
- From technocratic → deliberative decision-making
- From zero-sum trade-offs → win-win solutions

Corollary: scientists should restrict themselves to bringing the most accurate information they can; responsibility for decision-making should be held by citizens collectively, taking special account of those most directly affected.

Knowledge domains: socio-economic development and interdependence; environmental sustainability; international institutions, conflicts and human rights.
Skills: reading literacy → critical thinking (understand/appreciate); creative thinking → synthesis. Social-emotional skills: empathy, curiosity, tolerance — together constituting respect for other people and perspectives.

Core argument: Agency is the apex competency — "first among equals."

The problem it answers — William Damon (2008): young people's delay "is characterised more by indecision than by motivated reflection, more by confusion than the pursuit of clear goals, more by ambivalence than by determination…what is too often missing… is the kind of wholehearted dedication to an activity or interest that stems from a serious purpose."

Definitions:
- OECD Student Agency for 2030: students with agency "have the will to positively influence their own lives and the world around them"; they rely on motivation, hope, self-efficacy and growth mindset. Co-agency (teacher–student) points to collective agency.
- Leadbeater's triad: purpose is grounded in identity (who we are; what matters to us), intent (what change we want to bring about) and action (how we make this change demonstrable).

Contemplation vs action: Byung-Chul Han (2024) argues people should act less and contemplate more. Scharmer bridges: "only through deep awareness of system and self (being) is it possible to develop intention and initiate action (doing)." Adaptive problem-solving, ethical competence and acting in the world sit on the action side; understanding and appreciating the world on the contemplation side.

Four supporting skills: Creativity; Collaboration; Self-efficacy (grit, resilience, belief one can achieve goals in areas of natural strength but also initial weakness); Self-actualisation (the drive and insight to shape a personal narrative that patterns and directs one's life).

Framework: Theory U (Otto Scharmer) — Figure 2.10, also used in Ch. 6.
- Three divides: self–nature, self–others, self–self.
- Three openings: Open Mind (curiosity), Open Heart (compassion), Open Will (courage). (The report's own text has a typographical slip, rendering "Open Mind" as "Open heart".)
- The U journey: downloading past patterns → seeing with fresh eyes → sensing from the field (attention); presencing → crystallising vision (intent); prototyping by linking head, heart and hand → performing by operating from the whole (agency).
- Seven personal practices, one per process: becoming aware, listening, dialogue, presencing, co-imagination, co-creation, co-governance.

Scharmer is both an expert adviser to the framework and the author of a leadership development programme piloted with British Columbia, Estonia, Finland and the International Baccalaureate.

Core argument: Provide overall coherence and lay the ground for selecting metrics.

Three layers (Figure 3.1):
1. Foundation — core literacies (Mathematics, Science, Reading) + social and emotional skills + student wellbeing domains.
2. Five competencies.
3. Four dimensions of human flourishing — happiness, relationships, meaning, accomplishment.

Table 3.1 — OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) categories:

SSES finding (2024, 10- and 15-year-olds): disparities by age, gender and social background, and a decline in most of the skills compared with the first cycle in 2019, in the two sites participating in both cycles.

Nine wellbeing domains (Cignetti & Piacentini, 2024, from PISA data): academic performance; psychological wellbeing; agency and engagement; resilience; engagement with school; social relationships; study/life balance; material and cultural wellbeing; openness to diversity. Indicators mirror SES skills — e.g. psychological wellbeing uses emotional control, life satisfaction, sense of purpose; resilience uses stress resistance and belief in self.

PISA literacy definitions quoted:
- Reading (PISA 2018): "Understanding, using, evaluating, reflecting on and engaging with texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential and to participate in society." Central dimension = text processing (locate; understand; evaluate and reflect), plus task management (setting goals and plans; monitoring and regulating). "The fluent reader… is someone who is adept in both text processing and task management."
- Mathematics (PISA 2022): "An individual's capacity to reason mathematically and to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics to solve problems in a variety of real-world contexts…" Associated SES skills: persistence, creativity, self-direction, plus two "compound" skills — critical thinking and self-reflection.
- Science (draft PISA 2025): described as the most mature conceptualisation of how knowledge, cognitive skills and social-emotional skills interact. Introduces "scientific identity" — valuing scientific perspectives and approaches to enquiry; environmental awareness, concern and agency; affective elements of science identity. Its environmental science competencies require students to "demonstrate respect for diverse perspectives, and hope, in seeking solutions to socio-ecological crises."

Mapping of competencies to foundation:
- Adaptive problem-solving → primary sphere STEM; literacies Science and Mathematics; SES domains open-mindedness (creativity/divergent thinking), task performance, emotional regulation, plus compound self-efficacy.
- Ethical competence → Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities; literacies Reading and Science; SES skills curiosity, tolerance, empathy, trust.
- Appreciating the world → distinct cognitive base (arts knowledge and making); SES skills communication, collaboration, openness.
- Understanding the world → interdisciplinary; literacies Science (incl. identity) and Reading; SES empathy and curiosity (Collaboration), tolerance (Open-mindedness).
- Acting in the world → mobilises all literacies and all four other competencies; SES creativity, collaboration, self-efficacy, self-actualisation.

Three critical caveats (important for any board tempted to over-claim):

"we are not saying that individuals who are equipped with the human flourishing competencies are by definition flourishing human beings. We are not even saying that the competencies provide sufficient conditions… The argument we make is that the competencies provide necessary conditions."

Plus: other competency sets could be scaffolded by the same foundation for other purposes (employment being the historic alternative); and formal education is not the only setting — "the family, the workplace and religious settings may all contribute strongly" (VanderWeele, 2017).

Linkage to the four flourishing dimensions: relationships ← ethical reasoning (supported by understanding the world); meaning ← understanding + appreciating + acting in the world; accomplishment ← acting in the world (drawing especially on adaptive problem-solving); happiness ← the achievement of the other three — so all five competencies are engaged.

Part 1 — Three cross-cutting themes (Table 4.1):

Kitcher's three conditions for a life project: it must be autonomously chosen, at least in principle achievable, and not conflict with the achievement of another's project.

Knowledge types: episteme (scientific), techne (technical), phronesis (practical wisdom). Formal schooling privileges the first two; flourishing requires the third, which is "highly context dependent and subject to individual interpretation" and often "caught, not taught."

Wuwei (无为) — a Daoist teaching disposition: not inaction but effortless action; avoiding "anxious, effortful striving in order to bring about a state of affairs which may not be ready to be manifested." Cites Lobel (2017) and the Mencius image of the farmer who pulls up sprouts to help the grain grow and destroys them. Direct implication: schools must provide opportunities to try different projects but "cannot coerce or constrain students' choices one way or another."

STS principles adopted: technologies are intention amplifiers (so analysis must begin with intentions), and artefacts are imbued with politics (Winner, 1980). The key question about any technology "is never 'will it work', but rather 'what/whose intentions are being amplified.'" Historical caution: Cuban (2001) on the cycle of breathless excitement followed by education remaining "resolutely unchanged"; Ames (2019) on One Laptop Per Child. Firm position: "AI/ML will have a role in the assistance of human educators, who must remain as the final moral agent responsible for educational decisions." And: every technical invention is a pharmakon — simultaneously remedy and poison (Stiegler).

Framework: Figure 4.1 — Seven Spaces of the Learning Environment
1. Curricular — including the "excluded curriculum," whose impact on students' values and attitudes can be as great as what is included.
2. Pedagogical — pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987); "the medium is the message"; how we educate can matter as much as what.
3. Aesthetic — not a luxury; a venue for critical discussion of why some experiences are considered superior; "an education in aesthetics should be essential for all."
4. Social-emotional — CASEL's five skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision making; SEL improves academic achievement, increases pro-social behaviour and strengthens positive attitudes to self and school (Durlak et al., 2011). "Soft" refers to resistance to hard rules, not ease of acquisition.
5. Exploratory-imaginative — games, board games, simulations, drama, embodied cognition, and above all talk (Mercer).
6. Digital — hybrid/synchronous/asynchronous; MMORPGs; rules of reality can be suspended; "simultaneously helpful or harmful."
7. Physical — Reggio Emilia's space as the "third teacher" (after teachers and peers); school libraries; reconfigurable furniture; walls as spaces of beauty and knowledge.

Part 2 — Active learning. Engagement is cognitive, behavioural and emotional (Fredricks, Blumenfeld & Paris). Roots in Dewey (Experience and Education, 1938), Vygotsky, Piaget, Flavell (metacognition), Bandura (intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, self-reflectiveness).

Two pedagogical pillars (Figure 4.2):
- Teacher-guided learning — scaffolding (Bruner) within the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky); pre-task planning; task decomposition; role-modelling, prompts, input; use of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl); gradual withdrawal of guidance. Teachers should be "an authoritative (not authoritarian) guide."
- Experiential learning — Kolb (1984): "the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience," moving learners "from actor to observer, and from specific involvement to general analytic detachment." Four modes: concrete experience; reflective observation; abstract conceptualisation; active experimentation. Four critical aspects: emphasis on process not content/outcomes; knowledge as continuously created and recreated; learning transforms experience objectively and subjectively; to understand learning we must understand knowledge, and vice versa.

Table 4.2 lists ten technology-enabled teaching methods used at NIE Singapore, each with student benefit, tutor benefit and EHF implication: mobile/web feedback systems; Internet of Things sensors; VR/AR for Geography and Chemistry; Natural Language Processing of student chat data; an AI companion for laboratory safety; blended multimedia inquiry packages for diverse learners including special needs; a music self-diagnosis app; authentic video scenarios; a location-based mobile app for geographical data; and drones/3D apps for sports performance analysis.

Exemplar 1 — Knowledge Building Design Studio (KBDS), NIE, from 2019. Uses multi-modal learning analytics, AI and ICT plus the Knowledge Forum online discourse space. Four MMLA components: videos of student collaborations; transcripts of verbal and textual contributions; graphic outputs on pose, verbal and KF posts; selection of specific discussion instances.

Exemplar 2 — The makerspace (Table 4.3) as a site for adaptive problem-solving and ethical competence: disciplinary bases carry "various degrees of epistemic certainty"; "true creativity is not possible unless students are given the opportunity to develop their own initiative"; makerspaces teach students to "dismantle" artefacts and reassemble them, "becoming critical about how technologies are deployed for social good." Crucially, makerspaces normalise failure rather than treating it as a loss of teacher confidence.

The technology test questions for educators (verbatim, highly usable at a retreat): "Whose intentions is this tool amplifying and for what purpose? What is the impact? Should I as an educator for human flourishing welcome it? How does it help my students be involved cognitively, behaviourally and emotionally in their learning? Are there skills that they will not be using or may lose for lack of use? What might be side effects of this technology, and are these side effects worth the main effect?"

Closing image (Heng, 2024): the school as "a window to students' social awareness and ethical action" and "a mirror for their self-awareness."

Core argument: "Without a simultaneous re-skilling of educational capacity – its leadership and extended workforce – the project is doomed to failure. This is a failure humanity cannot afford."

Terminology ruling: "competency" is adopted as the key construct — "the combination of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes considered to be of value in a particular domain" — because it dissolves "the unhelpful and false dichotomy between knowledge vs skills."

Three system features EHF-oriented systems must embrace: Equity; AI enabled and aware; Ecosystemic.

Six leadership competencies:
1. Re-boot educational purpose through narrative — leaders participate in public narrative whether conscious of it or not; must "call out the old purpose of education, embedded in Human Capital Theory" and replace it with a narrative crafted for context, culture and history. Wellbeing must be woven in "as an aim in itself; not merely an instrument for better academic attainment."
2. Orchestrating learning ecosystems — quoting ISTP (2022): "The question should not be: 'What can schools do to serve all learners?' It should be: 'What can schools do to orchestrate various other government entities and community partners, and to leverage broader investments in social infrastructure, in order to give all learners the full range of supports they need?'" Sub-competencies: leading through influence not status; unlocking community learning assets; engagement beyond the education sector.
3. Championing equity — moving to EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion), embracing race, gender, LGBTQ and neurodiversity, and indigeneity. "The objective is not to help everyone achieve the same thing, expressed as a single set of minimum education requirements. It is more about helping everyone find their purpose through learning." Boushey (2019): rising inequality is a drain on talent, ideas and innovation.
4. Systems thinking: managing dynamic complexity — leaders need not be sophisticated system analysts, but must grasp the key concepts: purpose, power, relationships, resources and their interrelationship.
5. Leading and managing innovation — "inspire productive action in yourself and others during times of creation, invention, uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk" (Cone, 2019). Named methods: Human Centred Design (Harvard) and Spirals of Inquiry (British Columbia). Shared features: purpose upfront; acknowledging complexity; empowered teams inquiring together; prototyping; engaging learners, families and communities.
6. Developing agency in others and in self — the double bind: "if they themselves do not experience or enact agency, how can they teach their students to do so?" Extends distributed leadership into intergenerational leadership.

Four teacher competencies:
1. Facilitating deep learning — the key competency is skilled selection of the appropriate pedagogical approach, from an existing extensive repertoire: direct instruction, problem-based learning, cross-disciplinary teaching, service learning, passion-based learning, Socratic dialogue, project-based learning.
2. Curriculum co-design — neither "delivering the curriculum, as though it were a parcel" nor "an empty space to be filled at teachers' behest." Two modes: co-designing state-mandated content with state-level experts (case study: British Columbia's 2017 curriculum redesign, predicated on co-design with serving classroom teachers); and, where teachers have autonomy, co-designing with learners, staff and community. Requires unlearning: non-linear progression, and curriculum as "a living and evolving tool, not a fixed 'thing'." Figure 5.1 reproduces the OECD Education 2030 Principles of Education Design.
3. Assessment choreography — Lucas (2021): high-stakes standardised testing damages student health and wellbeing and fails to evidence the dispositions employers and universities want. Quoting W. T. Randolph, Commissioner of Education of Colorado:

"To solely use standardised achievement tests is like casting a net into the sea – a net that is intentionally designed to let the most interesting fish get away. Then, to describe the ones that are caught strictly in terms of their weight and length is to radically reduce what we know about them. To further conclude that all the contents of the sea consist of fish like those in the net compounds the error further. We need more kinds of fish. We need to know more about those we catch. We need new nets."

The "new nets" already in use: learner profiles (Mastery Transcript Consortium, International Baccalaureate, XP School UK, Big Picture Learning); psychometric tests (Dweck's Growth Mindset Assessment, Harvard's Human Flourishing App); extended investigations (the EPQ in the UK, the IB Extended Essay); micro-credentialing (Digital Promise). Professor Sandra Milligan (Assessment Research Centre, University of Melbourne — New Metrics for Success) defines the competent assessor as one who can design, with colleagues and learners, a process of gathering evidence from a variety of contexts, and make considered judgements about a learner's position on a scale from less to more expert. Notably, the report says statistics, normal curves, measurement theory, item analysis and standardisation do not feature in this competency's knowledge dimension. Attitude shift required: from assessment of learning to assessment for and as learning (Earl, 2012).
4. Digital literacy — including AI. Key data: only seven countries (China, Finland, Georgia, Qatar, Spain, Thailand, Türkiye) reported in 2023 that they had developed or were developing AI frameworks or training programmes for teachers; only Singapore's Ministry of Education reported building an online repository on the use of ChatGPT in teaching and learning (UNESCO, 2023). Per TALIS, teachers rank developing technology skills for teaching as their second-most important professional learning need, yet 44% of teachers in OECD countries receive no technology-related professional learning — while systems "spend substantial money on new technologies without investing in helping teachers to use it more effectively" (Schleicher, 2022). Required attitude: deploy AI wisely while remaining "vigilant about their shortcomings and risks" including hallucination.

Workforce scale context: UNESCO estimates a global need for an additional 24.4 million primary teachers and some 44.4 million secondary teachers to achieve universal basic education by 2030. Hannon frames the strategic choice starkly: High Competency–High Wage (the hallmark of a number of high performing systems) versus "accepting a lower level of professionalism, less job satisfaction and the current spiral of decline."

Also referenced: the "4 Cs" (critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, communication), character, and social-emotional competence including metacognition and wellbeing; 4-Dimensional Education (Center for Curriculum Redesign); "deeper learning" (Paniagua & Istance, 2018).

Hannon's closing reassurance: "No part of the framework proposed above is merely theoretical or hypothetical. Every dimension has real-life correlates in the real world, in action now."

Core argument: System change for flourishing must be purpose-led, ecosystemic and, ultimately, dependent on personal transformation in leaders. The chapter is explicitly "a sketch not a blueprint."

Starting point — Figure 6.1, Masters (2023), Building a World-Class Learning System, NCEE, derived from a Phase 1 review of British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea. Six interdependent components delivering desired learning outcomes under equitable and inclusive learning conditions. Masters defines equitable and inclusive conditions as "the promotion of learning environments that are culturally responsive, student-centred/personalised, intrinsically motivating, collaborative, technology-enabled, untracked and continuous/seamless." The report's verdict: the framework is "fully consistent with" EHF but does not entail it; three features must be developed — equity, ecosystems, and design/implementation strategy.

Equity — Figure 6.2, van Damme (2022): a two-dimensional mapping of concepts of social justice in education, plotting concepts against equality and diversity. Conclusion: the most promising policy goals are social inclusion and fairness. Van Damme's fairness is bold — "removing barriers is not enough: disadvantaged students should be compensated to create a level playing field." His social inclusion is nuanced (quoted): "an inclusive approach in education positively values diversity but aims not to develop diverse talents and abilities by special treatment, excessive personalisation or segregation but by bringing students together and connecting them to the collective good."

Ecosystems. Origins in the school partnerships movement; now the free-standing learning ecosystem. Five named cases (Clayton et al., 2023):
- Remake Learning, Pittsburgh — mobilises parental/family learning and deep engagement with museums, galleries and businesses.
- DigiOne, six Finnish cities — same strategy underpinned by networked data and content.
- Catalonia — supplements formal education with out-of-term learning in rural areas.
- Fundación mi Sangre, post-civil-war Colombia — independent non-formal learning; arts-based pedagogies place students, employers and former guerrillas in learning circles to address community problems.
- Delhi — the Happiness Curriculum to counter poverty and misogyny; external organisations creating alternative school-based experiences using meditation and family-based problem-solving.

Common features across all: multiple providers, innovative curricula and pedagogies, shared funding and governance. "Increasingly, all five describe their purposes in the language of human flourishing, as a response to adversity." The provocation: "Masters presents the supportive learning ecosystem as one dimension of the formal system… Education for human flourishing suggests that the ecosystem should be more than a component of the system. Over time it might subsume the system."

System Shift (Leadbeater & Winhall, 2024, after Donella Meadows): shifting a system requires a co-ordinated approach to changing purpose, power, relationships and resource flows — "but the greatest of these is purpose." "Standard policy interventions in systems tend to have shallow leverage because they work within the parameters of the current system."

The intention/emergence dilemma, posed as a series of open questions the report deliberately leaves unresolved:
- Is choosing a new purpose "more like choosing a new kitchen by looking through a catalogue or is it more like falling in love, you just find yourself doing it?"
- Purpose is often "a product of change not the starting point for change" — many technologies (telephone, record player) found their purpose after invention; Edison thought the record player would record telephone conversations.
- Banathy's distinction: deterministic/purposive systems reset episodically; heuristic/purpose-seeking systems continually learn what their purpose should be.
- Singular purpose (clarity, coherence, but may be mistaken or too narrow) vs plural purposes (realistic given divergent stakeholder interests, but internal competition, painful trade-offs and confusion). "Healthy systems do not tend to be monocultures."

The decisive judgement for boards:

"if a system were to take [a deterministic] approach to human flourishing it would create a very stunted version of flourishing… To achieve human flourishing a system would need a more open, regenerative, interpretative approach, to allow purpose to emerge from learning, experimentation and adaptation… It cannot be something specified in detail from on high in advance."

System transformation — Scharmer's awareness-based systems thinking (Figure 6.3, Social fields): systems in transition from output/efficiency orientation → user/stakeholder orientation → ecosystemic and regenerative. Four kinds of system activity across micro/meso/macro levels:
1. Listening — not only factual or empathic listening but "holding a space for what is ready to emerge."
2. Conversation — "the art of thinking together, of giving birth to new ideas, imaginings, identities and energies."
3. Organising — "decision-making circles that develop the capacity to act from local knowledge while being aware of cross-organisational interdependency and aligned by a shared purpose."
4. Co-ordinating and governing — "the natural self-interest of the players extends to a shared awareness of the whole ecosystem… The result is decisions and outcomes that benefit the whole system, not just my part of it."

Final sentence of the framework: "For systems and for people, transformation is often claimed but rarely achieved. In the case of systems, personal transformation may be a first and necessary step."