Education for Human Flourishing - A Conversation with Sir Anthony Seldon

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

One is making lifelong changes in the architecture of young people's brains and behaviors and emotions, and it will take time. And often in education, because we rush to measure things, we then deviate policy towards the positive measurement, even if the measurement isn't reliable or meaningful anyway.

Hello, welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is a real gem for me, as I'm speaking with someone who's been a great inspiration to me for a long time, Sir Anthony Seldon, who is a leading authority on both contemporary British history and education. He's the author of over 40 books on history, politics, and education. After an academic career and training as a teacher at King's College, Sir Anthony held headships at St Dunstan's College in South London, Brighton College, and Wellington College in Berkshire. In 2015, he left Wellington to become the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, a position he held until last year. Sir Anthony is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and King's College London, as well as the founder of the Sunday Times and now Telegraph Festival of Education and the Festival of Higher Education. He's widely known for introducing and promoting happiness, well-being, and mindfulness across education. Sir Anthony also founded Action for Happiness to bring these ideas to a wider audience with Professor Lord Richard Layard, and Geoff Mulgan. Sir Anthony is also the co-founder of the Institute for Ethical AI in Education. Some of Anthony's latest books include The Fourth Education Revolution Reconsidered with Oladimeji Abidoye and Timothy Metcalfe. He also wrote Beyond Happiness: How to Find Lasting Meaning and Joy in All That You Have in 2016.

Hi, Anthony. Hi, how are you?

Good morning, I'm good, thank you. How are you?

I'm fantastic, so happy to do this for you.

Thank you so much, it's a huge pleasure to have you here with us on the podcast. And personally, I've been working in education for a long time, and particularly with wellbeing, and have really followed your work from the days of Wellington. So I would just love to start there. Just in the early 2000s, I guess, you were, you know, doing some really innovative work their own happiness and wellbeing curriculum. And I would just love to ask you first, perhaps you could talk about the origins of that and where the inspiration for that came from, but also then what have you learned as a process of doing that kind of explicit teaching of those things in a school setting?

So the position was that I became head of Wellington College, which was a very, very traditional boarding school, though the Lessons in Happiness extend to all kinds of schools. I mean, the vast majority of schools worldwide are government or state schools, and the vast majority obviously are day rather than residential. But that's rather making the point that these approaches are more important than any differences that divide schools. They apply to every country on earth, to every single child of every single religious or no religious background, and every single social economic etc. category. So when I became head, Tim, I thought the school needed to go in a new direction because it did have an image of being very male, very tough, in need of more gentleness, more empathy, more emotional intelligence. And when I'd been head of a school called Brighton College, I'd not in a planned or systematic way tried to think about the wellbeing of the students, but I'd never come across the academic field of positive psychology, which I only did just before I joined Wellington and the work in particular of Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and a whole cluster of academics around him who had developed the science of positive effect and the interventions that can be made in classrooms to help the development of young people develop skills for life that will nurture them and help them make decisions that will be beneficial for their own long-term wellbeing and happiness and those people around them. So I explored that field and met Seligman, met people around him, and launched very early on in my time at Wellington the fact that we were going to be, I think, at the time it was Britain's first school teaching happiness. So it was partly that it chimed with my own sense about what education was, partly the needs of the school I was taking over, and partly my coming across this whole new academic domain of psychology.

Very good. And what did you kind of learn through those years of the process? Because I used Ian Morris's book a lot, Teaching Happiness and Wellbeing in Schools, for my own professional support. And he was with you at Wellington, right? And I just wondered, What did you learn from that process of actually working with the young people?

Well, one thing I learned was that you need to have people like Ian Morris. A head is important, but a head really can't do very much because staff and students often can do the opposite of what a head wants. And if it seems like yet another initiative, I mean, it's like the men from, and women, though they're mostly men from the ministry turning up with some new whizzy new directive and it has to have wide stakeholder support amongst the staff, teaching staff, support staff, parents, obviously students. And Ian Morris, who wrote the stunning book called Learning How to Ride Elephants, which he published in about 2000— I'm gonna get this wrong— 2009?

Yeah.

And came out of his work. So it was a very happy coincidence that he was already there thinking along the same lines. He is the person who did the work, developed the curriculum and rolled it out, oversaw the teaching of it by a group of teachers, was the passionate advocate of it, totally brilliant, and every school needs to have an Ian Morris, but they also need to have staff willing to teach it and the resources to do it. But I would say, Tim, that it's more than about what you learn in the classroom, it's very possible to have a wellbeing, happiness-orientated school that doesn't have classroom time allocated to it. In 2011, with Richard Layard of LSE School of Economics and Geoff Mulgan, who'd well before come out of Downing Street, we set up Action for Happiness. And that gives 10 steps that every institution, every individual can follow to make their own lives happier. So you asked, what did I learn? I learned that it has to be broad. I learned that to be in classrooms is important, but it's much bigger than that. So one of the brilliant things Ian did was to run mindfulness sessions in the morning, and he was very much an advocate of mindfulness. And clearly if students are punctuating their days with stillness, where they let go of churning thoughts and emotions and come back into the present moment, this is a very necessary grounding grounding that we all need to do. And the third thing I learned was that it's difficult, you know, that some parents, you have put their child in detention or worse for some terrible, terrible crime, and they will storm in to see you and say, 'You say you are a happiness school and you do this to my—' etc. And, you know, everything is easy in the head to have visions, but implementation is the biz, you know, that's where things happen and you just have to be practical and realistic and not expect things to happen overnight. And you can't entirely measure the changes anyway, but it was important that our academic results shot straight up because that, that shot the critics who said, this is all mumbo jumbo and how dare you play with our children's life chances. Well, actually, brav, life chances got a whole lot better because they were getting better grades as well as the fact that they were learning how to live life better. So yeah. Fantastic.

It's interesting what you were saying there, but you can't just do it in class because, and I actually find sometimes if you do just tie a neat little bow around a lesson called happiness or a lesson called wellbeing or whatever, actually that kills it more than it brings it to life. And if it doesn't live in the organization itself, then it's clearly, it's not going to really have the effect.

Absolutely. But you know, one of the lessons of happiness teaching is to choose optimism. Don't choose defeatism. Don't catastrophize. Don't say to yourself or of the program that this is really not working. Don't give up too soon. Yeah. One is making lifelong changes in the architecture of young people's brains and behaviors and emotions. And it will take time. And often in education, because we rush to measure things, we then deviate policy towards the positive measurement, even if the measurement isn't reliable or meaningful anyway, or even if the correlation between an intervention and perception of behavior isn't really very important. This is very important. It goes with intuition, and we leave out intuition in education. Intuition is what parents have. Parents don't know how to be good parents because they've read a book and they've read academic studies about this or that. They just know how to do it. And we have rolled out on an ironing board, we've squeezed out intuition and spontaneity from education because there's been a study at the University of Cambridge about this or that. I mean, goodness gracious. So I think that I always relied on intuition much more than academic studies. As a school teacher and as a school leader, I'm not saying that academic study, evidence-based interventions are not important. They're very important. I'm not saying that exams aren't important and tests. They're very important, but they're not all important. We are more than intellects.

I certainly feel I've seen a significant rise in people's awareness of these, the things you're talking about, the stillness, the wellbeing habits as a result of the pandemic and the lockdown and all of that, you know, the huge challenges that we faced over the recent months. Has that been the same for you? I mean, are you seeing an increasing amount of awareness and kind of reaching out for these kinds of skills and support structures? Yes.

And no, and I don't know. So yes, there's lots of evidence of people savoring each other much more and savoring fresh air and savoring good things in life, good food, good music, good literature, good television, and good human contact. But there's also lots of evidence of an increase in loneliness, increase in despair. Increase in anger and violence, not least against women. And then, so that's the no, and then the don't know. Well, this is where we need good academic studies to allow us to look at the impact of the first lockdown, the second, and who knows, maybe the third and the fourth national lockdowns coming up. And there will be libraries of books or masses of space in the cloud for studies of this. So it's really hard to tell at the moment. Yeah. I mean, I think that it's an opportunity, isn't it, for everybody to reflect on their own life, you know, and even though I'm supposed to be one of many leaders of well-being, that doesn't give me a passport not to have to work out every day that there's a good and a bad way to respond to things. And the temptation to be despondent, to go with negative thoughts, to act unkindly, you know, it's always there. Let me just say that an unkind action will never make one happy. That doesn't mean that one can't be firm and assert one's rights. But, you know, it's a constant issue, reflection on how am I leading my life and how can I make my own life and that of people around me— and of course they're totally intertwined— happier and better and more grounded and more real and more truthful and more honest and more healthy. I mean, you know, look, it's day by day, minute by minute, we're making these decisions and it's not good enough to say, well, I wasn't conscious of making it. Sorry, you were making it, whether it's conscious of it or not.

That's true. And within the education space, it feels to me that there has been a forced kind of reflection on the importance of, for example, final summative assessments and exams. And actually many educators that I speak to and listen to are beginning to speak a bit more about wellbeing, just because that's really come to the fore for the needs of young people and these kind of social-emotional competencies that increasingly we realize that in terms of their flourishing are going to be long-term much more important than just their academic results. It feels that there's been an increase in at least the conversation around those issues, which is for me a positive thing.

Yeah, of course. And we know from history that change comes out of crises and disruption and the need to change. And the fact that there are so many families, so many young people in torment and in distress at the moment, that there's so much learning that's being squandered, that this forces a spotlight onto what is education for, and what is it just about, the passing of tests and exams, or is it about the development of a human being? And by the way, in that process, the development of a human being, it's much more important the relationships in a school than whether there are happiness lessons in lesson 5 on a Wednesday. I mean, you know, by a factor of infinity, it is more important that every child is respected, that every member of support staff is respected, that the atmosphere is positive and kind and affirming, that demands are put on young people, but that where they fall short, they're not squashed and humiliated or rejected or told they've failed as a person. They might have failed at a particular test, but, you know, then what they can do to get that right. So I think there is a beginning of a wider intelligence. We've made intelligence far more a question about, you know, Mensa and IQ. We've moved away from that very narrow form of intelligence towards this much wider sense of what it means to be humanly intelligent.

And wisdom, perhaps. I had a different conversation about the role of wisdom in education, and I think, you know, that is a bit of a taboo word, but I think a lot of it for me is coming back to some of those ideas, some what we do with our understanding.

So in Beyond Happiness, I talk about joy and about wisdom and how wisdom lies beyond understanding and understanding lies beyond knowledge and knowledge lies beyond information and data and wisdom is something that we can aspire to, towards, and of its nature, it can't be defined. One can't do an MW, wisdom administration. It grows often in pain and in reflection and in humility. But clearly, if schools are blessed with a wise head or wise governors, I mean, often people who are fiercely intelligent, I couldn't possibly draw attention to a figure who's recently left the court of Boris Johnson, you can be fiercely intellectually intelligent but be totally and balefully lacking in wisdom. And wisdom is that ability to help create, in the school environment, a school that is compassionate towards young people and is developing them in a way that is modeling the behaviors, that it's less talked about than done. And we all learn much more from not people who preach, but people who are. The world is full of preachers, preaching academics, preaching religious leaders, preaching politicians, you know, and that surely was a point about Dominic Cummings, that he was preaching one thing, but doing another. And wisdom is about being holistic and being what one is, knowing oneself.

Amazing. And just then to move slightly, you've just recently republished, I think, your revised version of your book, The Fourth Education Revolution, with a provocative title, Will Artificial Intelligence Liberate or Infantilize Humanity? And you've obviously posited that education is a very important part of that liberating force. Perhaps you could just say a bit more about, are you optimistic, I guess, in terms of the liberation of humanity as we move into this AI and machine learning dominated age?

So this is coming towards us and we can mortgage out so much of our life to AI and it can render us idiots to pleasure, or we can use it to individuate young people by giving them personalized learning, personalized feedback and marking, and to take a lot of the dull repetitive work off teachers so that they can interact meaningfully with young people. I don't know if I'm an optimist or a pessimist or a realist or all three, probably all three. This is the coming issue. We didn't see the pandemic and it has made fools of all of us. And we could have seen it coming. We could have anticipated it. We're the same with the AI revolution coming in. Everybody involved in schools, every head, every teacher, every parent has to stop putting a paper bag on their head and smell the silicon. Yeah. Yeah. A few people have done more work here than somebody who should be a major ma— nationally known figure of Lord Clement Jones, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, who really does understand it. Absolutely.

Yeah. I do see some positive signs in the fact that there are, there seem to be, and again, it's hard to know when sometimes it's siloed conversations, but there are more and more people challenging the broken system. And I'm speaking with Priya in, you know, coming days about her book, Inadequate. And, you know, there's a lot of people now challenging that this, the system is really not serving. And, and to some extent, that's, that's a push from the AI kind of wave that's coming, but also there's something else, I think, and it maybe it harks back to some of those things about well-being and wisdom that actually we need to reorient our priorities somehow around something more human in response to this Silicon onslaught that we are going to be experiencing. Yeah, absolutely.

We have to work together. It's very hard in education to lift one's eyes above particularly during the pandemic, you know, where, where will the year 10s be on Tuesday morning? And where are we with the biology curriculum to think through these wider questions? And it can so easily be just yet another stress and worry. And, you know, we're not very good as human beings thinking about what we don't want to think about and thinking about the longer term. Like COVID, it was entirely obvious that COVID was going to hit us. It's entirely obvious that AI is going to hit us in a very major way.

So just in your role currently as the Vice Chancellor of University of Buckingham, clearly there's been a disruption, a major disruption, perhaps even more so of higher education than of K-12 education. So I just wondered what your thoughts were on, just as a result of the pandemic and a lot of these things that we're talking about, where you see higher education as having some major kind of existential challenges to think through.

Well, this is the biggest crisis for higher education ever. A bigger crisis than the First and Second World War, which hit them significantly. A bigger crisis than the revolts and instabilities in the '60s and '70s. And the worry is that the less economically strong universities will suffer. And that's a particular worry because they are often in the more economically deprived areas of the country. So clearly students are having a terrible time. Clearly there's a lot of justification in saying, why are we having to pay these full fees? And that's a real concern, but we also need to look after the university sector. So in that way, Tim, it's no different from looking after football clubs or small local museums and galleries and drama groups. We have to make certain that we don't break the architecture of the country. So when we do come through COVID and out the other side, we are wiser and better, and we haven't allowed the little battalions and the little groups, the little organizations, and the medium and the large ones to, to be crushed and to disappear, because we need the universities, not least the frailer, smaller, more bespoke, more regional, more remote universities, to come out and to be there flourishing for when we get through this. So Yeah. And just to say also, I stopped being head of the University of Buckingham last month and very, very wonderful that time was too. And I learned a lot about how, how extraordinary our universities are. Hmm. Brilliant. Well, thank you, Anthony. Tim, thank you. And as all really good conversations, it helps me to think and reflect, which is why I never want to have questions in advance because then one just gives pat answers. So thank you very much.

No, thank you. Wonderful. No, really, really appreciate it. And I I've been an admirer, a genuine admirer of yours for a long time, and so it's a real special privilege to be able to talk to you, and I hope that whatever's next for you is exciting, and I'm sure you'll be prolifically writing more books, as you seem to always be doing alongside everything else.

Thanks, Anthony. Really, really enjoyable half an hour. Thank you. Lovely.

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