I can see the attraction of this idea:
Charlie is one of the pupils at the £24,000-a-year
Wellington College, in Berkshire, who has benefited from fortnightly
"happiness classes", introduced last year.
Designed
by Ian Morris, the school’s head of philosophy and religion, along with
Nick Baylis, the director of the Well-being Institute at Cambridge
University, the programme gives pupils practical skills in areas as
diverse as meditation, channelling "negative" emotions and drug and
alcohol safety. There is even a session on "dumping" a boyfriend or
girlfriend. It has been championed by the master of the school, Anthony
Seldon, one of the independent sector’s most high profile heads.
The
scheme has been so successful that next month the college will host a
conference where headmasters and teachers from across the state and
independent sectors will sit through one of the 40-minute lessons and
learn how they can be applied.
As Professor Flynn pointed out (he of the Flynn effect on IQ scores) we may well have reached the limit of the rise in the systemic part of the possible rise in IQ and now need to work on the emotional side of things.
Professor Flynn believes there is no reason to believe IQ gains will
go on for ever. He points out that although gains are still robust in
America, they have stopped in Scandinavia.
“Perhaps their societies are more advanced than ours and their
trends will become our trends,” he told his audience at the Cambridge
Assessment Psychometrics Centre. The end of IQ gains over time do not
necessarily mean the end of cognitive progress, but the advances we
have made so far will be of little value unless we “take the next
step”, Professor Flynn said.
The challenge for humanity now is to enhance our ability to
debate moral and social questions intelligently. One way to do this
might be to concentrate on reading great works of literature which
expand our vocabulary, critical acumen and emotional maturity.
Two things that slightly worry me though. There’s a movement to make these sorts of classes mandatory: I’d much rather we see how it works in small groups first. Let’s test things before we implement them, shall we?
But what could possibly go wrong you might ask? Well, you recall that we were all told to talk about things, consult with grief counsellors if we had gone through some shattering event? And later it was found that doing so increases, rather than reduces, the stress?
Can we please use these rich kids at Wellington as our guinea pigs before we release this idea into the State school system?
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