Given the challenges before us, social and emotional learning programs aren’t enough to help students have a happy and healthy future.

War in Europe. Endemic racial injustice. A deadly pandemic. Climate change. Soaring inflation. The drumbeat of bad news is relentless. What should schools do? In recent years, some schools have focused on raising scores in reading, writing, and math instead of boldly facing these and other challenges confronting humanity. Ostrich-like avoidance of real-life issues was everywhere. Meanwhile the clock kept ticking, and our problems only got worse.

Some schools have responded to the distressing aspects of today’s world by infusing social and emotional learning (SEL) into their curricula, presumably to give students the internal resources to cope with challenges and the external skills to work with others to address them. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. school systems were spending over $20 billion a year on SEL, and teachers were dedicating 8% of their time to it (Krachman & Larocca, 2017).

In some ways, this is a welcome response to a world that is making us sick. But it’s far from clear that SEL is the best or the only way to respond to our crisis. Indeed, authors have debated the value of SEL in previous issues of Phi Delta Kappan and elsewhere. Yong Zhao (2020), for example, notes that the evidence in support of SEL is far more tentative than its advocates admit, and Joshua Starr (2019) expresses concern about the ambiguous meaning of SEL and the commercialization of the movement. Still others, like Tina Olesen (2012) and Madora Soutter (2019), argue that SEL may be doing children harm by emphasizing nonjudgmental detachment over moral clarity, and obedience over leadership.

Apart from these debates, we’ve found ourselves wondering whether the emphasis on SEL has led us to lose sight of something even more important: well-being. Why does this matter?

Understanding well-being

In the 1940s, a number of international organizations were founded with the goal of creating a more inclusive, prosperous, and peaceable world. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for example, stated in its 1945 constitution that its mission was to “contribute to the building of a culture of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue.” The constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020), first adopted in 1946, specifically called out well-being as central to health, which it defined as “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Together, these organizations present a vision of well-being that goes beyond managing personal mental health to include building a better world. This well-being agenda led the WHO to establish new professions such as psychiatric social work and school counseling. In recent years, the WHO has worked hand in hand with the United Nations to establish the Millennium Development Goals and then the Sustainable Development Goals to eliminate poverty, improve access to education, and halt climate change.

By and large, concerns about peace, democracy, justice, environmental sustainability, and physical health have been swept off the well-being table.

The social definition of well-being expressed by the WHO and UNESCO is still prominent across many parts of the world. Every few years, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) publishes child well-being report cards that present data from 41 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union. These address everything from the percentage of children living in poverty to the availability of high-quality childcare alongside measures of physical health and factors such as air pollution that could affect health. Some countries, like the Netherlands, Norway, and Iceland, study these data closely when establishing policies, which may contribute to these countries’ high well-being rankings.

In the United States, however, efforts to promote well-being have tended to focus on psychological strategies like self-regulation, resilience, empathy, and grit. A few organizations, such as the Center for Whole Health in K-12 Learning, have presented a more ambitious well-being vision by promoting nature education, school gardens, teaching kitchens, and lots of physical movement. But, by and large, concerns about peace, democracy, justice, environmental sustainability, and physical health have been swept off the well-being table. A lot of the most popular SEL programs, for example, are designed to help young people calm down and cope with a world that has gone awry instead of empowering those young people to get engaged with educational projects and initiatives that address how to change the world for good.

Data show that young people are in crisis. Even before the pandemic, 75% of young people in 10 countries, including the United States, said they were fearful about the future (Hickman et al., 2021). And since COVID-19, we’ve seen escalating rates of youth suicide attempts, especially among teenage girls (Yard et al., 2021). In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared an unprecedented national state of emergency in children’s mental health.

Schools are too often part of the problem. They heighten children’s anxieties with endless testing. They fill up kids’ daytime hours with excessive screen time. They require teachers teach to the test, post their standards on the wall before every lesson (even when the kids are too young to read them), follow the standardized lesson script, and implement draconian behavior management strategies. The hard truth is that our schools often make our children — and teachers — ill. Then, they introduce scattered initiatives, like health and wellness days, as a kind of carbon offset for the negative energy they generate. Most of these initiatives are silent on the toxic testing agenda or any of the other root causes of anxiety in schools.

A crisis is upon us. The time for a tweak here, or a nudge there, is over. Interventions informed by SEL have important roles to play in young people’s development. But they do not provide everything we need to meet the challenge. Instead, we must now go all-in for well-being. How can we do this?

Societal solutions for societal problems

An important step is to stop overinvesting in psychological solutions to societal problems. Resilience, empathy, and emotional regulation help young people to cope in the short term and perhaps to become nicer people too. But they do nothing by themselves to develop young people’s concern for nature and climate change. Nor do they help them understand war, strive for peace, or express justifiable outrage about irresponsible adult leadership.

Well-being, then, should be about so much more than building better relationships — or keeping calm and carrying on. It should take on and take down the worst aspects of testing, addictive technology use, and overly strict behavior management in schools. There’s little point in purchasing snappy new programs when the ways that a school or its system is run are making kids sick.

To reclaim this bold and visionary understanding of well-being, we must see SEL as only one contributor among many others to improving students’ mental and psychological health. Our collaborative research with a network of rural schools in the U.S.’s Pacific Northwest and with a consortium of 10 districts in Ontario, Canada (Shirley & Hargreaves, 2021a, 2021b), shows how some schools have been leading the way in three oft-neglected areas of well-being: social prosperity, ethical technology use, and the restorative power of nature.

Social prosperity

Even before COVID-19, the U.S. performed abysmally (36th out of 38) in international rankings on youth well-being (UNICEF Innocenti, 2020). Much of this is attributable to high percentages of the country’s young people growing up in poverty. Indeed, for more than 40 years, the U.S. has seen surging economic inequality (Horowitz, Igielnik, & Kochhar, 2020).

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) have devoted their careers to documenting the links between strong welfare states, generous policies of child support, and reductions in economic inequality. Countries that enact these kinds of policies, such as Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands, typically score at the top of the child well-being rankings. The U.S., however, lags far behind such nations with regard to health care provisions, paid parental leave, and social policies that prevent incarceration and recidivism. These are policies that actually extend life expectancy: the ultimate test of well-being (Reynolds & Avendano, 2018).

There’s little point in purchasing snappy new programs when the ways that a school or its system is run are making kids sick.

The U.S. needs what we call a prosperity doctrine. Dictionary.com defines prosperity as “a successful, flourishing, or thriving condition.” Societies that value prosperity define wealth not in fiscal terms alone but in relation to other factors that contribute to well-being. Leading economists such as Heather Boushey (2019), Kate Raworth (2017), and Mariana Mazzucato (2018) all put quality of life first in their understandings of what prosperity looks like in a society. Think of what Star Trek’s Spock meant when he urged others to “live long and prosper.” He surely didn’t have their financial bottom line in mind.

In education, striving for prosperity means focusing on making investments, rather than cutbacks and austerity. It also means curriculum shouldn’t only be connected to young people’s economic prospects but should also consider democracy, human rights, and environmental sustainability as essential aspects of their education. Some nonprofit organizations, such as Learning for Justice, have developed resources to help educators learn how this can be done.

School districts we’ve worked with have found numerous ways of promoting student well-being within the curriculum, not as an add-on to or offset for it, by getting students involved in solving problems that they saw as destructive to their communities’ prosperity. One Canadian district worked with the local trade unions, United Way partners, and other community organizations to lead a major public awareness campaign against the ravages of anxiety and depression. High school students in another district raised funds to support a refugee family. In rural Idaho, students in high school English classes studied the growing impact of drones in agriculture and then made recommendations to local elected officials to minimize the negative impacts of such technologies on migrant farm laborers.

Another aspect of the prosperity doctrine in education is ensuring that schools focus on teaching quality and student dignity, instead of performance scores and testing targets. In one Canadian district, elementary educators removed the stigmatizing deficit-focused language of “marker students” (known as “bubble students” in the U.S.) who were scoring just below proficiency in reading. Instead, they were asked to identify “students of wonder” or “students of mystery” and ask themselves how they would make progress with those students.

Ontario’s then-premier (equivalent to a U.S. state governor), Kathleen Wynne, was so moved by our evidence that standardized testing was creating ill-being that she commissioned and accepted a review of the province’s assessment system by an external team of which Andy was a member (Campbell et al., 2018). Among other things, the review recommended abolishing all standardized testing before grade 6, and in Ontario’s May 2022 election, three out of the four contending political parties pledged they would abolish standardized testing.

Even when high-stakes testing systems are in operation, school leaders can take steps to do the right thing for student well-being. One district leader serving many minoritized students in Ontario who were living in poverty became a hero to his teachers when he declared publicly that he didn’t “give a rat’s ass” about test scores. He wanted teachers to focus on their students and on getting them engaged with their learning instead.

All of these efforts incorporated SEL strategies like emotional regulation, grit, and growth mindsets. But they went all-in for a bigger and bolder agenda of well-being, too.

Ethical technology use

Another source of ill-being has to do with the excesses of technology use. A recent survey found that as many as 74% of Americans feel uneasy without their cell phones (Wheelright, 2022); this anxiety is a common enough experience that a new term — nomophobia — has been coined for it (Archer, 2013). The same survey found that 47% of Americans believe they are addicted to their phones, and another study found that 61% of U.S. parents believe their children share this addiction (Ratan et al., 2021).

Young people often turn to technology for assurance and validation (Elhai et al., 2017) in a world that seems to have spiraled out of control, but the best way to overcome anxiety and depression is not to hide from them in a digital hall of mirrors. As we’ve documented in our new book, Well-being in Schools, Ontario educators we’ve worked with have sought to balance their desire to incorporate more technology in response to student enthusiasm for it with their concerns for how excessive technology use might be having a negative effect on students’ mental health (Shirley & Hargreaves, 2021b).

Technology can indeed facilitate learning, when used appropriately. It provides easy access to information, instant feedback on performance, ways to collaborate with distant peers and colleagues, tools to overcome learning disabilities, simulations that promote creativity, and games that can take the dreariness out of learning. Digital platforms can activate students’ bodies and emotions, too. Our Boston College colleague, Marina Bers (2020), has studied how kindergartners “start clapping, shaking their bodies, and jumping up and down” while using coding to teach a digitized robot to dance to the “Hokey Pokey.”

In our own research, we’ve seen numerous examples of students using technology to collaborate with others and engage in real-world projects that promote community prosperity. In one Canadian district, students in middle school science classes measured water quality in their town, then compared it with a nearby Indigenous reservation in which mining companies have been active for decades. Students discovered that water quality on the reservation was far worse than in their community. Distressed to learn that a community just 30 minutes away didn’t have safe drinking water, students prepared PowerPoint presentations to advocate with public health officials for improving water quality on the reservation.

Although teachers in the schools we’ve worked with were sometimes concerned about the harm that excessive emphases on digital technologies could inflict on their students, they seemed to have no systematic strategies in place for addressing these risks. This is why Andy and his University of Ottawa colleagues have developed a 10-point charter for ethical technology use (Chenine, 2020). The charter includes provisions to make digital learning technologies accessible to all students, asks educators to use digital learning tools only when they have unique value and to introduce them in a careful and disciplined way, and encourages school systems to develop clear strategies for minimizing and managing risks of excessive screen time.

Restorative nature

Learning by being in nature has powerful benefits. It wards off anxiety and depression through outdoor activities that engage the body and calm the mind. It establishes relationships with nature that are foundational to environmental sustainability. It connects us to ancient Indigenous heritages. It instills feelings of awe at being part of something greater than ourselves. It also costs little. But we deprive children, especially children in poverty, of these benefits. Poor urban planning, factory-like school buildings, pitiful amounts of time for recess, and endless hours shut indoors prepping for tests or being hypnotized on screens are subjecting our children to what Richard Louv (2005) calls nature-deficit disorder.

But this isn’t the case everywhere. In Washington state, educators in one school we studied worked with park rangers to help students understand the importance of protecting the Columbia River salmon fisheries that are the key to an economic revival in a working-class community suffering from high unemployment. In the awe-inspiring wilderness of Denali National Park in Alaska, students learned about the frequently bitter conflicts between local coal miners and the environmental tourism industry. In the small town of Cusick, Washington, a special education teacher worked with a Native American middle school student who combined smartphone pictures of his first deer hunt with a narrative explaining how he prepared the hide to be tanned and the meat to be preserved. In some Canadian districts, teachers linked their curricula with outdoor programs involving canoeing, dog-sledding, fishing, and building fires and shelters. These promoted the students’ well-being and taught them how to respect nature.

The positive side of negative emotions

In 1989, Bobby McFerrin’s upbeat “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” won the Song of the Year for the 31st Grammy Awards. It was an irresistible message. It spoke to an enduring optimism in popular culture. But happiness isn’t everything. And sometimes, it’s not even the best thing.

Too often, SEL interventions sideline or subdue emotions like anger, anxiety, and sadness and attempt to hype up other emotions like happiness and joy as the best ways to be well. Yet a large body of research actually points to potential positive effects of supposedly negative emotions. One study found that when facing a threat, “people who lack fear or anger may be at a disadvantage, because their bodies are not as well prepared for a fight” (Gruber, Mauss, & Tamir, 2011, p. 225). Another reported that “individuals in negative moods” are often more creative than others because they are motivated to “exert high levels of effort and persistence” to make changes while happy individuals are more likely to “evaluate the status quo and their own ideas positively” (George & Zhou, 2002, p. 687). A third study identified “defensive pessimists” as people who expect the worst and become skilled at anticipating difficulties. When they are asked to be less pessimistic, their performance declines, because they fail to confront their challenges (Gasper, Lozinski, & LeBeau, 2009).

Going all-in for well-being should not mean ignoring or repressing negative emotions. It’s better to accept and work with them. Indeed, anger at injustice, frustration with self-serving leaders, and disgust with bullying can galvanize young people to combat societal barriers to well-being. Learning how to marshal so-called negative emotions is crucial for the transformations our schools and our society need.

In one Ontario middle school, educators worked with Indigenous elders to develop a “Red Feather Project” in which all students studied the cases of more than 1,000 missing or murdered Indigenous women and then students wrote each woman’s name on a red feather and hung those feathers from a tree in their town square to raise awareness about this injustice. “To be there that day was beautiful, because there were so many members of the community there,” one teacher said. “There were members from the First Nations community. It was a real coming together.” In the U.S., the organization Facing History and Ourselves, through its lessons on harrowing topics such as the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, exemplifies how schools can engage with difficult issues. Because the curriculum shows how everyone can speak out against injustice, both students and teachers report feeling empowered as a result of their participation (Facing History and Ourselves, 2019).

Regrettably, these kinds of curricula now face a backlash in the U.S. More than a dozen states have passed legislation or enacted policies prescribing how and whether teachers address issues of race and gender identity, and legislators in another 23 states have introduced bills to curtail teachers’ freedom to discuss these topics. Although many of these bills have been defeated, some are still making their way through the state legislatures (Schwartz, 2021). It appears that standardized testing and the highly pressurized systems that create so much anxiety and depression can stay in schools, but the freedom to explore compelling social issues that more and more young people want to engage with is being officially circumscribed and effectively censored.

Coping skills are not enough

Many of the psychologically based interventions we’re bringing into our schools through SEL programs and similar initiatives are important for helping students cope with and recover from stress and trauma, develop empathy, and build better relationships. In all these ways, such programs shield young people from real harm.

But going all in for well-being requires far more. It strikes at the causes of these harms, stands behind policies to eradicate them, and enjoins young people to become part of the solution. Our task as educators is not just to equip young people with skills to adapt to and live with a world that has fallen off its axis. It also must rally students and build their confidence, knowledge, and skills so they can help get the world back in balance.

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This article appears in the September 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 1, pp. 44-49.