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Teaching Happiness and
Well-being in Schools
Other titles available from Bloomsbury Education:

Creating Tomorrow’s Schools Today by Richard Gerver

How to Survive an Ofsted Inspection by Sarah Findlater
Lesson Planning Tweaks for Teachers by Melanie Aberson and Debbie Light
Teacher Toolkit by Ross Morrison McGill
The Literacy Leader’s Toolkit by Graham Tyrer and Patrick Taylor
Teaching Happiness and
Well-being in Schools
Learning to ride elephants
Second Edition
Ian Morris

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
 Bloomsbury Education
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First edition published 2013 by Continuum International Publishing Group

© Ian Morris 2015

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To Georgie, Olivia and Felix: the most important people in my life.
There but for the grace of you go I.
And for my parents, who showed me how to find the important
things in the first place.
Contents
Acknowledgements x
Foreword by Professor Kristján Kristjánsson xi
Introduction xii

Part 1 The foundations of happiness and

well-being in education 1
1 The place of well-being and happiness in education 3
The instrumental view of education 4
Happiness in education 7
Eudaimonism: another way of coming down the stairs 8
The acquisition of virtue 10
Eudaimonism as a unifying language for schools 11
Which virtues? 13
Other approaches to well-being, happiness and eudaimonia 14
Care in education 16
2 Space for well-being 21
Education as happiness: how the curriculum contributes to eudaimonia 22
My World: Matthew Moss High School, Rochdale, UK 23
The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme 23
The relational in education 25
The emotional skills of teaching 26
Shame and pride 29
Restorative justice 31
Coaching 34
Applying restorative justice and coaching with colleagues 36

Part 2 Creating a curriculum for happiness and well-being 39

3 Preparing the ground 41

Making well-being different: avoiding health terrorism 41
Well-being and the curriculum 44
Well-being lessons: awareness; intervention; reflection 45
The experiential 48

4 Care of the body 53

Meeting the body’s needs 55
 Eating well and virtue 55
Exercise 57
Sleep 61
Caring for our emotions 63
Primary emotion 64
Learning emotion 64
Secondary emotions 65
The brain and learning 68
Incontinence and executive function 70

5 Care of the mind 73

Resilience 74
The ABC 76
Thinking traps 77
Putting it in perspective: one of the PRP skills 79
Resilient learners 80
The mind diet 82
The philosopher’s mind 84
Getting started with teaching philosophy 85
The moral mind 89
Phronesis and the moral mind 90
Moral psychology 92

6 Care of others 97
Empathy 99
Listening and being present 103
Naïve realism and judgement 104
Kindness 106
Service 108
Trust 108
Gossip 110
Conflict resolution 111
Sex and relationships 114

7 Care of our passions 119

The rat catcher 119
Strengthspotting 120
Character strengths 122
Authenticity 123
A note on challenge 125
Flow 126
Contents

Impediment to our passions number 1: extrinsic motivation 130

Impediment to our passions number 2: the fixed mindset 132

viii
 8 Care of our place in the world 137
Consumerism and emotion 139
Ethical consumption 139
Habituation and the hedonic treadmill 140
Choice 141
Delaying gratification 142
Status anxiety 143
Virtue and technology 147
Technology and remembering our humanity 149

9 Mindfulness, spirituality and meaning 153

Mindfulness meditation 153
The evidence base for mindfulness 155
Mindfulness in schools 158
Spirituality 161
What is spirituality? 162
Spirituality and the child 164
Meaning making 166

10 The well-being of teachers 169

Individual and institutional vices and virtues 170
The virtues of teachers 171
Autonomy, flow and meaning 172
Perspective on pay and conditions 173
Learning from each other: coaching and appreciative inquiry 175

Notes 179
Bibliography 196
Index 201

Contents

ix
Acknowledgements
I would firstly like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues and pupils, past and present, at Wellington
College, UK, who have given me the opportunity to develop Well-being education. Through support
and friendship they have provided an environment to be creative, and through challenge and critical
feedback they have helped me to refine and shape my ideas. I would also like to thank the Jubilee
Centre at the University of Birmingham for opening the door to eudaimonism for me and enabling me
to create a philosophical framework for what I do as a teacher.
A number of people provided me with invaluable help in shaping early drafts of the manuscript, and
I am very lucky to have been able to draw upon their expertise. In particular, I would like to thank Jamie
Carter, Guy Williams, Kristján Kristjánsson, McKenzie Cerri, Quinn Simpson, Iain Henderson, Maria Arpa,
Sam Gutteridge, Clare Finzi, Mike Goves, Tracy Pye, Delyth Lynch, Carl Hendrick and Matt Oakman for
their time and suggestions. I am also grateful to Tanya Byron, Peter Hindley, Geoff Mulgan and Katherine
Weare for assisting me with research and directing me to resources and information that I would not
have otherwise found.
I also want to thank my family for their contribution to this book. My mother-in-law, Sally Sugg,
subjected herself to drafts of the whole manuscript and was always honest and generous with her
feedback. My children, Olivia and Felix, showed understanding beyond their years as they calmly
accepted my monastic existence in the study and my unavailability for play as I wrote this. They are a
constant source of joy and inspiration to me, and this book is much the richer for their presence in my
life. Above all, my most heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Georgie. She has been with me on my well-being
journey from the start, and her creativity, counsel and guidance, as I have wrangled these ideas into
shape, is of immeasurable value to me. She has also resigned herself to virtually being a single parent as
I have written this, for which I cannot thank her enough.
Foreword
Professor Richard Layard described the first edition of this book as ‘remarkable’. This second edition is, in
my view, even more deserving of such a commendation. Radically reworked from the original version, this
book promotes the simple idea – widely agreed upon by teachers and parents – that schools are meant
to prepare students for the tests of life rather than just a life of tests. While both simple and powerful,
this idea has become increasingly lost in an age of Gradgrindian instrumentalism that considers all
educational goals subordinate to narrow academic metrics and the prospects of well-paid jobs in the
future. Ian Morris offers the radical alternative of arguing that the ultimate purpose of education is human
well-being or flourishing, and that everything we do in schools should be geared towards this aim.
Although I do miss some of the irreverent and self-deprecating humour of the first edition – the signs
of a free spirit finding his feet in moral and educational space – this has been replaced by a much more
rigorous, consistent and academically-serious argument. Stimulated by work in the Jubilee Centre for
Character and Virtues, Morris now considers Aristotelian eudaimonism – with its objective view of well-
being and its application of the language of virtue and character – to constitute the most sound and
sophisticated understanding of well-being available. Chapters 1 and 2 explicate this philosophical basis
of the book. Subsequently, Chapters 3 to 9 provide practical advice on the design and execution of a well-
being curriculum, and the last chapter tackles the issue of the well-being of the teachers themselves.
As Morris explains in Chapter 3, well-being does not consist simply in the removal of impediments
to human flourishing, but instead, in attempts to develop the positive dispositions, or virtues, that
bring human flourishing about. While many teachers would concur with this statement, they typically
complain about not being prepared to carry out well-being goals, and they express confusion about
the ‘semantic minefield’ of subjects aimed at developing the whole child. For example, what Morris calls
‘well-being education’, others would specify as ‘positive education’ (in the latest jargon) and we in the
Jubilee Centre simply as ‘character education’ (on a broad enough specification of ‘character’). To be sure,
the absence of a common language in which these efforts have been couched has not made life easier
for teachers, and the endless flavour-of-the-month varieties that have continuously been on offer have
instilled a dismissive cry-wolf attitude among them, which – alongside simple initiative fatigue – has
contributed to the lack of sustained uptake.
Most of those excuses will melt away, however, after reading Morris’s book. It offers a user-friendly
moral and educational GPS to help with the semantic navigation, and it provides a sustained argument
for eudaimonism as a unifying language for schooling. I particularly applaud the emphasis on the
character and needs not only of students, but also teachers, because ‘teachers who are stressed or
demoralised make poor role models for young people’ (Ch. 10). All in all, I can hardly think of a better
introduction to well-being education, and to the intrinsic values that make up good education, for
teachers, parents and students, and I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Kristján Kristjánsson
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham
January 2015
Introduction
I’d like to begin by asking you to imagine that you are about to go for a journey on the back of a
magnificent, big-eared, African elephant. Having climbed onto his back, you are sitting astride him,
your legs resting against his thick, wrinkly skin and your hands upon his shoulders. You don’t know the
elephant, but the guide assures you that he is good natured and that he likes humans. You set off: just
you, alone on top of your elephant, following on behind a procession of other elephant riders. Pretty
soon you get used to the elephant’s lumbering rhythm: the movement of his shoulders, the swaying
of his head and trunk, the bellows-like swell and shrink of his flanks as he breathes beneath you. You lift
your head from your elephant’s neck and begin to notice the other riders – some seem steadier than
you, others seem less secure, some are ecstatically happy, others are nervous and seem to cling on to
their animal for dear life. You’re happy with your first attempt at elephant riding.
Then you begin to think about your destination and suddenly realize that you don’t know where
you are going. You try to look to the head of the procession, but amidst the clouds of dust kicked
up by giant feet and the swaying, colourfully-clothed compatriots ahead, you realize that the guide
you had assumed to be at the front, might not be there after all. You start to get concerned. You look
around nervously, but nobody else seems to share your fears: the lady behind you smiles and waves.
Your mind rushes on to thinking about how to stop the elephant to get off. The guides all speak
Swahili to the elephants. You don’t speak Swahili. You don’t even have reins to make him change
direction. It dawns on you that this elephant is out of your control. All the while, he plods along
ten paces behind the elephant in front, keeping perfect step, following the route set out for him. It
eventually strikes you that the elephant knows exactly where it is going: all you have to do is relax
and let him carry you there.
The metaphor of riding elephants comes from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis and
it is a metaphor which helps to illustrate the place of happiness and well-being in education. Haidt
explains that, metaphorically, the key to successful animal riding is a harmonious relationship between
the animal and its rider. In order to guide an elephant to where you want to go, you have to be able
not only to know your destination, but also to understand the elephant and all of the little aspects of
elephant behaviour which will make your journey a success. You also have to be able to trust that, in
certain circumstances, the elephant knows best and allow yourself to be guided by him.
For Haidt, the elephant and its rider is a metaphor for being human. The rider, the small component
attempting to control everything, represents the conscious, thinking self. The elephant, the vast,
powerful set of forces which the rider is attempting to control, represents everything else: all of the
myriad unnoticed processes of the brain and all of the extraordinary panoply of events which take place
in the body. As Haidt explains, it is a mistake to see the two as separate:

Our minds are loose confederations of parts, but we identify with and pay too much attention to one part:
conscious verbal thinking … Because we can see only one little corner of the mind’s vast operation, we are
surprised when urges, wishes, and temptations emerge, seemingly from nowhere … We sometimes fall into the
 view that we are fighting with our unconscious, our id, or our animal self, but really we are the whole thing. We
are the rider, and we are the elephant.1

Teaching happiness and well-being is about trying to help children to bring the elephant and rider
into one harmonious whole, as Haidt describes above. Our mistake is often to believe that the rider, the
conscious thinking self, holds all the answers, is the master in all situations and always knows best. The
aim of teaching happiness and well-being is to teach the rider, not only about himself, but also about
the elephant that he rides. If we can provide young people with an elephant rider’s manual, in other
words, if we can teach them how they function as humans and then teach them how to be not just
functioning humans, but excellent ones, we might be able to help them to avoid many of the pitfalls
that arise either from a rider that tries to exert too much control, or from a runaway elephant. However,
the teaching of happiness and well-being raises bigger questions about the nature and purpose of
education itself. If we accept on any level that it would be a good idea to teach young people about
happiness and well-being, we in turn accept that education itself has a contribution to make to the
happiness and well-being of children. The content of this book is twofold as a consequence.

How to read this book

Chapter 1 attempts to provide a sound foundation for the claim that the sole purpose of education is
well-being: that everything we do in schools should be geared towards this aim and that all other aims
(exam results, citizenship, economic prosperity etc.) are subordinate to it. I use the language of virtue
and character, which in my view develops the most sound and sophisticated understanding of human
happiness and well-being available to us. Chapter 2 explores how schools can make use of an ethics
of care to support well-being as the aim of education and it provides practical suggestions in the form
of coaching and restorative justice as examples of whole-school practices that can create a culture of
well-being.
Chapters 1 and 2, therefore, are the philosophical basis of the book. Chapters 3 to 9 provide practical
advice on some of the elements that might go to create a well-being curriculum in a school setting
and some of the teaching techniques that can be employed to bring a curriculum to life. Each of these
chapters contains some of the theory behind the content that could be included and some examples
of lesson activities and resources that could be used. The last chapter of the book addresses the issue of
the well-being of teachers.
My own journey with the teaching of well-being began in January 2006, when I heard a lecture
about the – at the time, relatively new – scientific research into human flourishing. It was immediately
obvious to me that the fruits of this research needed to find their way into a classroom and since then
I have been trying to find ways of doing just that. I am first and foremost a classroom teacher in a
secondary school: I love teaching and I care deeply about education. What I have personally found
through teaching well-being, is a reinvigoration and deepening of my own educational values and
Introduction

philosophy: I now understand why I do what I do in a much more profound way. But it’s not just me.
My colleagues who teach our well-being programme often say the same thing, and when I visit other
schools and conferences and talk about teaching well-being, the feedback is very often that a philosophy

xiii
 of education based on well-being resonates entirely with colleagues’ reasons for entering the teaching
profession in the first place: namely, to contribute to human flourishing. In my view, a philosophy of
education that puts well-being front and centre has the potential to re-orientate all of our efforts in
schools in a much more meaningful way than the current and, in my view, impoverished debate about
the purpose of education.
Introduction

xiv
Part 1

The foundations of
happiness and well-being
in education
1 The place of well-being and
happiness in education

Chapter preview
The instrumental view of education 4
Happiness in education 7
Eudaimonism: another way of coming down the stairs 8
The acquisition of virtue 10
Eudaimonism as a unifying language for schools 11
Which virtues? 13
Other approaches to well-being, happiness and eudaimonia 14
Care in education 16

Introduction
In A.A. Milne’s story Winnie the Pooh and Some Bees, we meet poor Edward Bear, who is in a bit of a predicament. He
is being pulled down the stairs on his head by his friend Christopher Robin and as the bumps continue, he pauses for
reflection and wonders if there is another way of coming down the stairs: ‘...if only he could stop bumping for a moment
and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.’ What a frustrating situation for a little bear to be in.1

Poor Edward Bear, what a hopeless predicament! To have the solution to a problem so tantalisingly
on the tip of awareness and yet to be denied access to it not out of callousness or malice, but out of
ignorance. If only Christopher Robin knew of Edward Bear’s proximity to a solution that might bring
genuine happiness to them both: and if only he were aware of the effect of his actions on suppressing
that solution every time he comes down the stairs!
Many of us involved in teaching, especially at secondary level, feel just like Edward Bear: that the
current state of affairs is not quite ideal and that there really is another way of thinking about the
educational provision that we are involved in. There is, I think, a sense for many teachers that education
could be different; that it could be about something different. There is also a palpable sense in which
many feel prevented from exploring what these possibilities might be because of what could be termed
the ‘Christopher Robin effect’: the way in which seemingly relentless pressures present in contemporary
education make it very difficult for us to pause to think deeply and differently about what we are doing.
This book is a direct response to these feelings and it has two principal aims. The first aim, to stretch
the metaphor, is to provide poor Edward Bear with some hope. I would like to sketch out a vision of
 what education could be about, so that Edward Bear can believe there really is another way of coming
down the stairs. The second aim of the book, once we have given Edward the resources to stop banging
his head, is to show him how he might come down the stairs differently. In other words, once we have
identified a clear purpose for education, I’ll attempt to give some clear and concrete ideas for how to go
about implementing it.

The instrumental view of education

We should have left this sad piece of nonsense [that schooling is centrally about exam success] behind us with
the twentieth century. Its schools were caught up in a regime of getting on, doing ever better, getting more and
more efficient – but within a system that had lost sight of what it was about. . .schools should be mainly about
equipping people to lead a fulfilling life.2

John White

One of the greatest dystopian visions of education was created by Charles Dickens in his novel Hard
Times. We are presented with the character, Thomas Gradgrind, who has created a bleak vision of
education that has been reduced to the simplest, most easily-repeatable bare bones. Learning consists
simply of rote memorisation of fact: in Dickens’ words, like ‘reducing the sea itself into its component
drops’. Gradgrind’s philosophy of education suffers from malnutrition. There is no higher meaning or
purpose to learning and no sense of the good to which education may contribute; he simply sees
children as ‘little pitchers. . .to be filled so full of facts’. The Gradgrind School does not concern itself with
human relationships, flourishing or fulfilment, and the fullness, mystery, majesty and wonder of human
existence does not feature. No thought is given either to what the facts mean in a greater context of
understanding existence, or to the relational, pedagogical process through which they come to be
learned. Any idea that education might stretch beyond what can be tested and verified – such as a
moral education in being human – is entirely and deliberately absent: all that matters is that the facts
can be demonstrated to have been learned, nothing more.
Through the tragic lives of the Gradgrind family and the callousness of characters like Bitzer,
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

Dickens makes the point that there can be little or no separation between the project of education
in schools and our deepest wishes about what human life should be about. He warns us that factory
schools produce graduates who are only partially human, and if we reduce education to mechanistic
efficiencies – to instrumentalism – then we imperil the power of education to liberate and contribute
to fulfilment.
The philosopher Charles Taylor argues in The Ethics of Authenticity, that the instrumentalism Dickens
confronts us with presents a major challenge to contemporary Western culture. Life has, he suggests,
become narrowed and flattened by an undue emphasis on instrumental reason:

By “instrumental reason” I mean the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical
application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost-output ratio, is its measure of

4
 success. . .there is also a widespread unease that instrumental reason has enlarged its scope but also threatens
to take over our lives. The fear is that things that ought to be determined by other criteria will be decided in
terms of efficiency or “cost-benefit” analysis, that the independent ends that ought to be guiding our lives will
be eclipsed by the demand to maximise output.3

This sentiment is echoed in Martha Nussbaum’s 2011 book Creating Capabilities:

For a long time, economists, policy-makers, and bureaucrats who work on the problems of the world’s poorer
nations told people a story that distorted human experience. Their dominant models asserted that the
quality of life in a nation was improving when, and only when, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita was
increasing. This crude measure gave high marks to countries that contained alarming inequalities, countries
in which a large proportion of people were not enjoying the fruits of a nation’s overall economic improvement.
Because countries respond to public rankings that affect their international reputation, the crude approach
encouraged them to work for economic growth alone, without attending to the living standard of their poorer
inhabitants, and without addressing issues such as health and education, which typically do not improve with
economic growth.4

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of the processes of increasing efficiency and productivity
mentioned in these two extracts. The problem comes when we treat these processes as ends in
themselves – as intrinsic goods – and lose sight of Charles Taylor’s ‘independent ends that ought to be
guiding our lives’. Increased productivity or efficiency should be considered worthwhile only in so far as
they contribute to the emergence of greater goods. For example, in the fifteenth century, the de Medici
family used the wealth they acquired through productive and efficient commerce to enable humanism
and the arts to flourish in Renaissance Florence. The wealth which produced those greater goods was
not considered an end in itself but a means to produce works of great beauty, an example of one of
those independent ends that ought to guide life. Perhaps the worst aspect of instrumentalism is the
way in which it enables the exploitation of fellow human beings to serve non-human ends. The classic
example of this is the sweatshop run by a tyrant who values productivity and profit over persons; the
bottom line over individual human dignity, value and rights.
We see this means–ends confusion being mirrored in education, where we have seen the slow

The place of well-being and happiness in education

creep of instrumentalism in recent decades. The laudable aim of raising educational standards in
schools led to an emphasis on exam results and league tables by policy makers, schools inspectorates
and school leadership to measure school success. The standards agenda, especially in British schools,
has led to significant progress, not only in the number of young people leaving schools better
qualified (and therefore better able to access further training and opportunities) but also progress in
professional standards of teaching. The use of league tables and an emphasis on measuring where
schools add value has been a very powerful tool for providing evidence of what schools are doing
and how they can improve.5 However, we are left with the slightly absurd situation that the tool
used to indicate educational quality – the means – has now become the utterly inadequate end
of education itself. In the same way that Nussbaum describes GDP above, output in terms of exam
results has gone up, but at the cost of an ever-decreasing interest in how education contributes
to greater human goods. In fixating upon the means, we lose sight of proper ends, and the means

5
 become ends in themselves. This begins the moment we become teachers. For those entering
training for the profession now, there is often precious little talk of human goods we aim to achieve
through education, but, instead, the repeatable, observable, quantifiable skills or techniques that
can be employed to maximise pupil output in examinations. To quote Peter Abbs: ‘we have gone
from Plato to Tesco’.6
The drive to maximise results, in the absence of a better philosophy, creates consequences that
should be unwelcome in schools. There is the now ubiquitous pressure on young people to ‘achieve’,
usually without any notions of the wider human goods to which this achievement may contribute.
Coupled with micro-management and the language of marginal gains, some children come
to believe that their value is determined by what they can produce for the school, and they are
incessantly hassled to produce it. This exerts a psychological pressure which is too hard for some of
them to bear.7 In a 2014 editorial for the British Medical Journal, Professor Chris Bonell underscored
this point:

Some schools not only neglect students’ health but may actively harm it. A systematic review of all qualitative
research in this area suggests that in school systems that focus on narrow academic metrics, such as those
in England and the United States, some schools respond by focusing on the more able students, and not
engaging other students or recognising their efforts. This is associated with many students, especially those
from disadvantaged backgrounds, disengaging from school and instead investing in “anti-school” peer
groups and risk behaviours, such as smoking, taking drugs, and violence. Furthermore, research suggests that
“teaching to the test,” which commonly occurs in school systems with a narrow focus on attainment, can harm
students’ mental health.8

As Bonell suggests, performance pressure directs some educational leaders down the dark alleyway
of exclusion and neglect. Anecdotal reports of children being excluded in the run up to exams so as
not to damage a school’s league table position are not uncommon, nor are stories of schools entering
students as private candidates for fear that their anticipated poor results will spoil the school’s brand
and market image. This is an utter failing of ethics in any school: to exploit children in this way and treat
them as mere means to an end is to fail Kant’s most basic test of morality: that of treating humans as
ends in themselves with absolute dignity and worth. We might also question how this breaches a child’s
right not only to not be exploited, but also to identify and pursue their own educational goals utterly
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

independent of a school’s desire to publish good results.

This is complicated by the presence of market-like forces in educational provision. In the UK, schools
receive funding based on the number of pupils on roll. UK parents exercise choice over which schools they
apply to, in the same way that consumers in markets exercise choice. Schools are ‘incentivised’ to increase
their funding by making themselves more appealing by improving their educational performance, with
schools performing poorly shrinking and closing. This performance is measured almost exclusively in
terms of exam results and now, exam results across a narrow band of ‘traditionally academic’ subjects
such as maths, science, English, a humanity and a language.9 Predictably, commentators are reporting
that funding and resources are being concentrated in those areas of the curriculum that are most valued
to the detriment of the creative arts, music and drama which, as Nussbaum argues elsewhere in Not for
Profit, are indispensable to a complete education that produces people who flourish and are good

6
citizens.10 There is also the demographic impact. Schools with good results attract families into their
catchment areas: this leads to an increase in house prices, making it harder for poorer families to move
near good schools. The introduction of market-like incentives is causing us to compete over access to
a broad curriculum and access to schools themselves. Education is not a resource that we should have
to compete over: it is a fundamental human good. Treating results as intrinsic goods, turning children
into producers and viewing schools as markets that will thrive like Amazon or fail like Woolworths is
the result of an educational myopia that is dehumanising education for many children in just the way
Dickens warned us about.

Happiness in education
Education is, to use Taylor’s language, one of those ‘things that ought to be determined by other criteria’.
We are currently allowing educational provision to be determined by efficiency and maximization of
output of exam results and we have lost the sense that education should be seamlessly woven into our
vision for human life as a whole; that our aims of education should be coterminous with our aims for a
good human life. If we can assume that the aim of human life is happiness (and I think that this is a more
or less uncontroversial assumption) then we can conclude that the aim of education ought to coincide
with that: however, this demands that we are clear about what we mean by happiness.
Critics are sceptical of selecting happiness as the aim for education because to them it implies
that schools should simply focus on whatever makes children feel good. The objection is that true,
worthwhile learning is difficult, and any system that focuses more on pleasurable emotions and self-
esteem would necessarily steer children away from difficulty and the painful emotions associated with
it, thereby missing out on all of the growth emerging from struggle. This is linked to a concern that
the twentieth century witnessed a rise in narcissism and obsession with the self, and that to place
happiness as the aim of education would be to engage young people in a selfish pursuit that focuses
more on individual feelings, rather than the liberation that can come from immersion in learning a
challenging discipline.11 I agree with this objection; however, it assumes a particular understanding of
happiness called the hedonic view: the belief that happiness consists exclusively in a preponderance

The place of well-being and happiness in education

of pleasure over pain.
As Kristján Kristjánsson explains, there are three main objections to the hedonic view of happiness.12
Firstly, we don’t just experience pleasure, we evaluate pleasure: this is what separates us from animals.
Kristjánsson cites Sissela Bok’s discussion of Robert Nozick’s famous ‘Experience Machine’ thought
experiment, in which he asks us if we would be willing to sacrifice normal life for a life floating in a tank
where our brain is connected up to a machine which provides a life of pleasure. Should we be willing
to do this?

Nozick’s answer to his question is a resounding “No.” Far more matters to us as human beings, he argues, than
what we experience, no matter how pleasant. First of all, we want to do certain things, not just believe we are
doing them. Second, we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is
an indeterminate blob.13

7
 The second objection mentioned by Kristjánsson, is that people adapt quickly to pleasure: the so-called
‘hedonic treadmill’ which is explored in more depth in Chapter 8. The third objection is that any pleasure
‘however shallow, degraded or addictive’ counts towards happiness: this sort of ‘whatever makes you
happy’ approach which gives no moral attention to the means by which happiness is achieved cannot
have a place in any school.
An education based on the hedonic view would create confusion about happiness, not just because
of the three objections cited above, but because it would create the impression that happiness is a
passive, fleeting end state which occurs when certain conditions (such as exam success) are met.
Happiness, therefore, is somehow always beyond our grasp, leaving us like hamsters in a wheel, striving
to get somewhere we never arrive to. I think that we would be right to object to the adoption of a
hedonistic conception of happiness as our aim of education, but that does not mean that we have to
dispense with the notion of pursuing happiness in education.

Eudaimonism: another way of coming down the stairs

There is another way of looking at happiness which may overcome the problems posed by hedonism.
It is called the eudaimonic approach, and it traces its history through modern proponents, such as Julia
Annas, Martha Nussbaum and Kristján Kristjánsson, back to its roots in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In
Intelligent Virtue, Julia Annas explains how the eudaimonist approach sees happiness, or eudaimonia, as
a richer state than simply the superficial experience of pleasure. In eudaimonism, happiness is an activity;
happiness is living well rather than being a state we enjoy as a result of living well. To clarify the concept,
Annas makes the crucial distinction between the circumstances of a life on the one hand, and the living
of a life on the other. For many, happiness is achieved when our desires are met: when we have enough
money, the right car, a certain level of health, a good job, the right exam results and so on. These, for
Annas, are the circumstances of a life, and it is a mistake to look for happiness in these places:

Happiness is not a matter of the stuff you have, or whether you are beautiful, healthy, powerful or rich. A happy
life is not one in which you just have these things – after all, plenty of people have all these things but in no way
live happily. A happy life is one in which you deal well with these things that you have – and cope well with
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

illness, poverty, and loss of status, if these things happen to you. Accounts of happiness in this way of thinking
are telling us how to live our lives, not urging us either to keep or change the circumstances of our lives.14 (My
italics)

In eudaimonism, happiness is to be found in the living of a life. It is an on-going activity where we

use reason and good judgement to act rightly and in pursuit of the good. Eudaimonia is not in some
way passive and separated from the activities that bring it about; rather, it is a process as Kristján
Kristjánsson points out: ‘eudaimonia is not a mere state (such as health or wealth) but an ongoing
activity of rational virtue.’15 I understand well-being in a similar way, i.e. that well-being consists of
engaging in those activities that go to make up a life well-lived; and I use the words ‘happiness’ and
‘well-being’ interchangeably for this reason. In 2008, the UK Government Office for Science published

8
the Foresight Report into Mental Capital and Well-being, in which mental well-being was defined as
follows:

[Well-being] is a dynamic state in which the individual is able to develop their potential, work productively and
creatively, build strong and positive relationships with others, and contribute to their community. It is enhanced
when an individual is able to fulfil their personal and social goals and achieve a sense of purpose in society.16

This definition overlaps in important ways with Aristotle’s understanding of eudaimonia, where ‘human
flourishing consists of the realisation of virtues of thought and character and the fulfilment of other
specifically human physical and mental potentialities over a whole course of life.’17 The eudaimonist
account of happiness calls upon us to envisage human life as an on-going process of developing
potential through engaging in certain activities which contribute to our own flourishing and to the
flourishing of those around us.
Eudaimonism is based upon the realisation of virtue and it is important that we pause to interrogate
what is meant by virtue, because it is axiomatic for what follows in the rest of this book. The word ‘virtue’
has inherited an unfortunate puritanical baggage and is often taken to simply mean ‘piety’ or ‘chastity’
(even though these might be considered virtues in a greater understanding of the term). It is a word
that we shy away from using and, certainly, it is a word that is absent from much current educational
discourse. However, upon discovering what virtue really means, we can see that this absence is a mistake.
Virtue is ubiquitous and we use it more than we realise. When I choose to go for a run on a rainy day, I am
using virtue. When a teenager chooses homework over Facebook, she is using virtue. When my mum
propagates a plant from a cutting, she uses virtue. When my colleague chooses to empathise with the
pupil with late work, he is using virtue. A virtue is the ability to feel and act well in any given situation.
Virtue is, to quote Annas again:

. . .a lasting feature of a person, a tendency for a person to be a certain way. It is not merely a lasting feature,
however, one that just sits there undisturbed. It is active: to have it is to be disposed to act in certain ways. And it
develops through selective response to the circumstances.18

Virtues are learned and acquired over the course of a lifetime, and they are developed through deliberate

The place of well-being and happiness in education

practice and education. The virtues we develop go to form our character, both of which are works in
progress stretching throughout a lifetime:

Virtue is not a once for all achievement but a disposition of our character that is constantly developing as it
meets new challenges and enlarges the understanding it involves. . .As we develop virtue, our understanding of
corresponding virtue also develops.19

Virtue, or the disposition to act in certain ways, is rather like a skill.20 This skill is in part the result of
reasoning out which human activities will best serve good ends, and Aristotle called the ability to
identify a good course of action where competing demands are placed upon us phronesis, or practical
wisdom. But being virtuous is not just a matter of reasoning and logic; it involves being emotionally
skilful too. For Aristotle, a mark of virtue is the way that we feel in response to the circumstances

9
 we find ourselves in. With practice, we should be in a position to have ‘feelings at the right times,
on the right grounds, towards the right people, for the right motive and in the right way.’21 Reason
and emotion, therefore, are foundational to living well, and virtue for eudaimonists constitutes – in
whole or in part – our happiness as human beings.22 Eudaimonism also provides a response to the
accusation that a focus on happiness in education will produce selfish, individualistic narcissists. In the
eudaimonist, virtue tradition, happiness is inseparable from building relationships and communities,
as Alastair MacIntyre explains here:

For what education in the virtues teaches me is that my good as a man is one and the same as the good of
the others with whom I am bound up in human community. There is no way of pursuing my good which
is necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours
peculiarly – goods are not private property.23

There are different domains of virtue. In its 2013 Framework for Character Education in Schools, the Jubilee
Centre for Character and Virtue at the University of Birmingham outlined 4 areas in which virtue may be
developed.24 ‘Moral virtue’, the domain we are most likely to already be acquainted with, is the family of
virtues associated with identifying, choosing and doing the good, based upon sound moral reasoning.
‘Civic virtue’ is the family of virtues associated with living well in a community and ‘performance virtue’
relates to ‘behavioural skills and psychological capacities that – while they can be used for both good
and bad ends – enable us to put our character habits into practice’; the so-called meta-cognitive skills,
examples of which include creativity and resilience. The fourth domain is that of ‘intellectual virtue’
which we draw upon when engaged in intellectual or technical tasks which are normally taught to us
by an expert or mentor.

The acquisition of virtue

If schools and teachers accept that the aim of education is the development of virtue, it is obviously
important that they appreciate how one goes about acquiring and developing virtue in the first place.
Julia Annas likens the acquisition of virtue to the acquisition of complex skills such as piano playing or
building.25 In her account, becoming more skilled in virtue is driven along by two things: the need to
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

learn and the drive to aspire. To develop a skill we need to learn it through experience, practice and in
the company of someone who can teach us that skill. This is accompanied by the drive to aspire, which
involves the desire to become better at the skill, to acquire it for ourselves and become completely self-
directed, all the time refining the skill in the light of new experiences. For Annas, the complexity lies in
going beyond the mere aping of the actions of our teacher and in developing articulacy about our skill:
being able to understand why we act in particular ways and to be able to give and take reasons for the
things that we do. The drive to aspire emphasises our agency and autonomy. In becoming virtuous we
see ourselves as learners constantly striving to develop our understanding of how to respond to the
circumstances of our lives in the presence of those who have already achieved a level of understanding:
this creates in us a sense that we are autonomous agents, piloting the vehicle ourselves. The drive to

10
aspire also requires us to envisage the acquisition of virtue as a life-long process, not a process that is
complete, say, at the end of compulsory schooling.
In the online materials for teaching character and virtue, The Jubilee Centre provides a 5-step model
for helping children to think about how they might acquire virtue26:

1 Notice: this involves developing a level of awareness that particular situations call for particular
virtues, such as recognising another person’s need that we can meet through kindness.
2 Stop: taking a moment to pause and reflect on what is required of us and to consider how the virtue
can be deployed.
3 Look: observing the emotions in ourselves and others in the situation and considering whether
our emotional response is appropriate; for example in a situation where there is injustice, asking
ourselves if we are excessively angry and if we can temper our anger to righteous indignation.
4 Listen: being able to give and take reasons for our actions and getting guidance from others on
what might be the right way to act.
5 Caterpillar: thinking about who we want to become and how our actions will shape our character. A
useful image to illustrate this comes from Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar, where the colours of the
food the caterpillar eats are reflected in the wings of the butterfly he becomes.

What matters most, is that the child considers herself a rational, autonomous agent, constantly in the
process of widening her understanding of how to feel, think and act well, as opposed to being buffeted
about by the simple satisfaction of desires, or being carried along by the situations she finds herself in.
In seeing our lives as the on-going project of the acquisition of virtue through learning and aspiring, we
re-affirm our human essence as learners who constantly desire to understand how to live better.

Eudaimonism as a unifying language for schools

Because eudaimonism shows us that the happy life consists of learning to live well through the realisation

The place of well-being and happiness in education

of virtue, its importance for helping enrich the educational work of schools cannot be overstated.
What else can schools be for, other than helping children flourish as human beings by enabling them
to acquire the moral, civic, performance and intellectual virtues that comprise good character? Our
contemporary fixation with results – in the absence of a better philosophy – falls short of this and, even
though virtue may be realised through training for exams, there are far more opportunities to make
school an apprenticeship in virtue than are currently being exploited. These opportunities are explored
in Chapter 2.
Dickens’ caricature of education in the Gradgrind system is so striking because there is no proper
philosophy of education to it. There is no explanation of how his schools contribute to the good
and, because of that, they don’t. Eudaimonism provides what Gradgrind and elements of modern
education lack: a unifying language that unites all the endeavours of a school community and
orientates them towards the good of human flourishing. This can be illustrated by the example

11
 of the territorial disputes that sometimes occur in schools over access to pupil time or limited
resources. Suppose, for example, a school has decided to stage a large drama production with a
big cast in the run-up to the public exam season. The director requires large numbers of pupils to
give up considerable time to rehearse at the same time as teachers are desperate for their pupils
to revise and prepare for examinations. At the same time, the sports coaches might be trying
to field teams in fixtures and finding that they have no time to train their players. Stressful. The
stress is exacerbated when each activity is being driven to achieve performance outcomes; the
director is under pressure to stage a near-professional production; the sports coaches are expected
to secure victories, while the teachers and their line-managers are expected to achieve certain
percentages of good exam results. The performance demands in this situation are divisive, because
the resources available to produce them (namely people and time) are in limited supply, and we
are forced to compete over them. It is not just access to limited resources which causes the tension.
When we pit people against each other in order to drive up standards, often by placing them in
rank order of performance, we pitch them into a battle of egos and involve the powerful emotions
of shame and pride.
This example illustrates either a lack of a unifying language (i.e. a philosophy of education) or the use
of a unifying language that turns out to be bogus. The language of performance outcomes purports to
unify in theory, because all are expected to contribute to success, and all enjoy its fruits when it comes;
but in practice it divides because its use of competition sets those of us who are actually united in a
common educational purpose against each other. Annas writes about three features of eudaimonism
which seem to address this issue of unifying languages in educational communities: the structured way
of thinking about life; nested goals; and the unifying tendency.
Much of what takes place between student and teacher in schools involves the one making a request
of the other to behave in a particular way. This generally revolves around teachers requesting students
to engage in activities that will enable them to learn, and, at the more tertiary stages of education,
succeed in obtaining qualifications. If we are uncritically engaged in making this happen i.e., if we simply
make students learn without asking why, we are taking what Annas calls a linear approach to thinking
about life. If on the other hand, we pause to reflect upon our intentions as teachers and also ask the
students to reflect on their intentions as learners and ask why we are doing this, we are taking what she
calls the structured approach to thinking about life.
As soon as we take this structured approach and step back to examine why we do what we do, we
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

identify our goals. Annas explains that our goals have a particular nature: they are nested, rather like
sets of tables which fit inside one another. Why do I teach the mind – body problem to my philosophy
students? Because it will make them better philosophers and it forms part of the exam. Why do I
want these two outcomes for them? Because philosophy helps us to understand human existence
and passing the exam opens the door for further opportunities. Why do I want these two outcomes?
Because, hopefully, they will eventually lead to my students’ fulfilment, flourishing and happiness. Annas
suggests that upon examining my goals, I realise that they are nested – they fit together coherently –
and are unified towards some common purpose or telos, even if this telos is not fully obvious to us at
every given moment, as she explains here:

12
 This thinking is unifying about the goals because they are all my goals, and I need to have an integrated
and unifying way of achieving them because I have only one life, the life I am living. What is activated is not
thinking in the abstract about types of goal and how they could fit together, but thinking about how I can
achieve the goals I have in the life I have. It is thinking about my life and how it is going. It is practical thinking,
thinking about my life and how I should structure it. Thus the original everyday thinking about the way I do
one thing I do is for the sake of another thing I do leads seamlessly into thinking about my life as a whole in a
structured way.27

Eudaimonism provides a unifying language for school communities, because it makes clear that we
are all engaged in the realisation of virtue. In any community there is a huge diversity of personal and
organisational goals, but all of them can come to be seen as nested within each other and unified
towards the common purpose of eudaimonia. Because our vision for education is so often truncated
by the concern to achieve results, we are left with a performance obsession that may divide and pit
us against one another. In creating an educational community oriented towards the common goal of
virtue, character and flourishing, obsessions with performance can be swallowed up and transformed
by the much bigger concern of producing good human beings. Not just this, but our work as educators
becomes much more intricately woven into the lives of our pupils as a whole: I cease to be just a teacher
of a subject and instead use my subject knowledge as a vehicle for contributing to the much bigger
project of helping people to live the good life. I am not so idealistic as to believe that eudaimonism
will put an end to competing demands over limited resources in schools, but it does provide us with
a framework that can reconcile these conflicts through an understanding of the greater project of
contributing to human becoming.

Which virtues?
It would be tempting, if we accept that the acquisition of virtues across a range of domains is the aim
of education, to create a list of the virtues that schools ought to promote and perhaps to even set up
assessment frameworks to quantify the acquisition of these virtues. I think that this ought to be resisted,

The place of well-being and happiness in education

and I have a number of reasons for saying so. Firstly, by its nature, any list of virtues will be exclusive and,
in the context of a community like a school, if certain virtues are excluded from the list, this may in turn
lead to certain individuals feeling excluded because a virtue which they prize and which is integral to
their identity does not appear. Secondly, in seeking to generate a list of virtues, communities may find
themselves embroiled in debates that are sideshows; for example, how many virtues to have, how to
properly define and distinguish them from each other and which virtues best represent the character of
the institutions. In getting bogged down in issues such as these, we lose sight of the idea that all virtues
are excellences which may contribute to the good human life. Thirdly, in creating a list of virtues, there
is an inherent danger of prescribing and creating a one-size-fits-all vision of human life which does not
match reality. As both Alastair MacIntyre28 and Julia Annas make clear, the circumstances of our lives vary
within communities, across cultures and throughout history. What matters most, given the variance of
human experience, is not a full understanding of every virtue, but the practical wisdom and judgement –

13
 phronesis – to decide which virtue(s) to deploy at any given time, and how to deploy them, as Annas
explains:

There is no such thing as being virtuous in a way which will be appropriate to all kinds of lives, or one ideal
balance of virtues such as courage or patience that could be got right once and for all for everybody. Virtue
is not the kind of thing that can be specified in advance so as to be one size that fits all, precisely because
practical intelligence gets things right in very diverse circumstances. . .Each of us needs to do different work to
integrate the virtues we need to deal with the circumstances of our life as we aim to live well.29

Instead of a list of virtues which can gradually be ticked off – or worse still, graded – as they are learned
and practised, we should, instead, think of school-based character education as a framework, guided
by practical wisdom, which will enable young people to acquire virtues as they encounter the myriad
challenges of being learners in communities. The virtue profiles of each individual and each learning
community will shift and change as the tides of life experience come in and out.
Let’s draw these threads together. The eudaimonic view of life is one which sees happiness being
reached not through the acquisition of certain life circumstances, but through the development of
certain skills of living well, namely, the virtues. A eudaimonic approach to education, therefore, would
argue that education is an activity that produces happiness through teaching and practice of the virtues.
According to this view, schools and teachers are concerned with enabling pupils to acquire and develop
virtues across the 4 domains: moral, civic, performance and intellectual. Not only this, but if we agree
with Annas’ account of eudaimonism and agree that it can work as a vision for education, all education
should involve a structured (i.e. reflective) way of thinking about life which reveals nested goals that lead
to a unifying view of education: namely that everything we do in educational settings should be about
the acquisition of the virtues and development of a character that will maximise the chances of living a
happy, fulfilled and flourishing life.

Other approaches to well-being, happiness and

eudaimonia
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

Additional support for a eudaimonist account of education comes from John White’s 2011 book
Exploring Well-being in Schools. As we saw in the quotation above, White is unambiguous that school
should be about much more than the mere acquisition of exam results and qualifications. White clarifies
his position that well-being should be the aim of education later by defining it as follows:

Education for well-being involves preparing children for a life of autonomous, whole-hearted and successful
engagement in worthwhile activities and relationships.30

For White, examining schools through the lens of well-being forces us to expand and re-order our
vision for education. He argues that the mistake we have made – especially in secondary education – is
to begin with a list of subjects we would like children to master and to then graft the aims of education

14
and the types of dispositions and personal qualities we would like children to acquire onto those
subjects, with the inevitable consequence that subjects take primacy and aims and dispositions
become obscured. Instead, White suggests, we should begin with a clear aim for schools – in his view,
well-being – then identify the dispositions that would support well-being and set the curriculum on
those pillars. By ‘dispositions’ and ‘personal qualities’ I take White to mean virtue and character, which
can be seen here:

What should exercise us initially is not that the child becomes proficient in French, or knows about the atomic
structure of matter, or be able to solve algebraic equations. These things may or may not be important in her
education, but if they are they come into view at a different place. The starting point is that she should have the
positive qualities needed for a flourishing life. We would not want her to become brilliant at algebra and Latin,
but also cripplingly anxious, or cynical, or a sadist. First things first.31

White is not advocating the scrapping of the subjects – although his view does demand a radical re-
think of how they might be delivered – nor is he suggesting the stripping-out of subject content and
knowledge: he is arguing that education as well-being requires us to re-order our priorities in a way
which immediately makes complete sense of them. In teaching an academic discipline, of course I want
my students to acquire the intellectual virtues which accompany its mastery and I would like them to
do well enough to access the next round of opportunities, but those skills and that success can only
take them so far. How tragic it would be for my students to emerge, like Bitzer or the Gradgrind children
above, proficient in curricular skill but devoid of the moral, civic and performance virtues that ultimately
lead to a life well lived. Eudaimonism demands that schools go beyond helping their students to pass
exams and expand their concern to the living of a life across the different domains of virtue: to abdicate
this duty is to fail our students.
Of course, the counter-argument to this position is that if schools could only get the business of the
academic curriculum right, we would enable students to become happy through the discovery of the
joy of learning. In his book What’s the Point of School?, Guy Claxton argues that if schools were better
able to help children to learn and engage with the process of learning in the first place, then education
would make children happier:

The place of well-being and happiness in education

Happiness is better seen as a by-product of having done something challenging and worthwhile. Happiness
is a mixture of pride, satisfaction and the sense of effectiveness and value that arises when we have stretched
ourselves to achieve something we care about. In other words, happiness is the fruit of worthwhile learning. In
my view, too much stress and unhappiness in young people’s lives comes from the fact that they do not know
how to learn, nor what it is that they want to learn about. If we can help them to discover the things they most
passionately want to get better at, and to develop the confidence and capability to pursue those passions, then
I think more happiness and less stress will be the result.32

As it stands, Claxton argues, current educational provision, especially in the UK, leaves many school
leavers stressed and anxious with its focus on testing and accumulating qualifications. For him, modern
education does not connect children to the fundamental joys of learning and has missed the opportunity

15
 to use the school years as what he calls an ‘epistemic apprenticeship’, where children learn to become
learners, a point alluded to by John Holt in How Children Fail:

We are by nature question-asking, answer-making, problem-solving animals, and we are extremely good at it,
above all when we are little. But under certain conditions, which may exist anywhere and certainly exist almost
all of the time in almost all schools, we stop using our greatest intellectual powers, stop wanting to use them,
even stop believing that we have them.33

Too often, Claxton argues, children spend time learning about learning and accumulating an ineffective
language of learning, rather than actually learning to learn. Schools have been hamstrung by
accountability and are afraid of allowing children to take risks as learners, to explore real-life, meaningful
and challenging material without the close teacher control that arises when a certain percentage of
A*-C grades has to be achieved. Claxton’s solution is an approach called ‘Building Learning Power’, or
‘The Learning Gymnasium’, where children spend time developing their ‘learning muscles’ (i.e. learning
how to learn) and discovering that they delight in learning. In Claxton’s view, an education system with
the child and her learning at its centre would lead to children who experience happiness through the
activity of learning.
However, Claxton stops short of advocating a specific focus on the teaching of happiness and
well-being. For him, lessons of this sort, which have only operated at a superficial level in the past,
would become superfluous if the formal curriculum was delivered properly, as is also argued by
Judith Suissa in her article Lessons from a new science? On teaching happiness in schools.34 As you might
expect, given what follows for the remainder of the book, I disagree with this position. I am convinced
by Claxton, that a properly-delivered academic curriculum will, no doubt, result in increased levels of
happiness and well-being, but it is my view that this curriculum would be augmented by the direct
and deliberate teaching of happiness which focuses on the acquisition of virtues: in short, on learning
how to live well. It is for this reason that I distinguish between ‘education as happiness’ and ‘educating
for happiness’, where the former represents the view that Claxton holds and the latter represents
the view that discrete time must be given over in schools to the kind of education I describe in the
remainder of this book.
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

Care in education
In placing well-being as the central aim of education we are also implicitly endorsing the language of
caring. Care is a non-judgemental attitude which extends in a number of directions: self, others, our
environment and so on. Care is predicated on empathy, the ability to feel as others feel and take on their
perspective and it emphasizes the importance of friendships and relationships. Care ethics emerged in
large part as a response to a narrowing of ethics to focus either on rules and duty, or on maximising good
consequences and utility. Proponents of care ethics have argued that whilst rules and consideration of
consequences may be useful in ethics, they can only take us so far. Ethics has good human relationships
and flourishing as its central concern, so to subordinate the relational to the upholding of rules or the
maximisation of utility is to subvert the whole enterprise of ethics. Much of the work done in care ethics

16
has been applied to medicine, where many feel that the drive for the meeting of targets has come at a
cost to the relationships that lie at the heart of patient care. The same may be equally true of education
and of educational systems. If we devote too much of our energy to either the upholding of rules or
the meeting of targets in abstraction from the human goods they serve, we imperil the very context
in which meaningful learning takes place: the relationships that exist between pupils and teachers and
between pupils and pupils.
Again, we should be wary of creating a false dichotomy between care on the one hand and
results on the other. Results are simply a measure of excellence, and to focus too closely on results
may be to lose sight of what it actually is that produces them: care and concern for excellence
and the virtues which produce it. If we are committed to caring for those in our communities and
also to the excellence of the practices we are attempting to develop – maths, playing the flute,
friendship – we are committed to the acquisition of the virtues which make the excellence of those
practices possible. What matters is the question of what takes primacy and what can be used to
serve those primary aims. The development of virtue assumes that my role as teacher is based
upon an attitude of care for my pupils and the excellences they are developing. For my pupils, it
assumes that they will adopt an attitude of care towards themselves and their learning and towards
others. With that foundation in place, we might then look to establish certain rules and targets
that will serve an attitude of care and the development of virtue, rather than exist purely as ends
in themselves.
For Martin Heidegger, care was central to his understanding of the meaning of our existence as
humans. The following comes from his Letter on Humanism:

Where else does “care” tend but in the direction of bringing man back to his essence? For this is humanism:
meditating and caring, that man be human and not inhumane, “inhuman” that is, outside his essence. But in
what does the humanity of man consist? It lies in his essence.35

Heidegger understood care as a form of paying attention to everything in my existence that enables
me to live fully: my relationships, my projects, the familiar objects of my life, and so on. He also
emphasised the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of everything. The notion that there is a
gap between where I end and the world begins is a mistaken one; my world is not fragmented and

The place of well-being and happiness in education

atomised, it is unified into webs of meaning by human beings. We see a similar emphasis in the
writings of Aristotle and in the modern work of Julia Annas, both of whom tell us that compassion
and community are central to a life well-lived. By engaging in learning to live well or teaching others
how to do so, we show care and concern in Heidegger’s rich sense of care as bringing man back to
his essence.
Iain McGilchrist picks up on Heidegger’s concept of care in his remarkable book The Master and
his Emissary, which has as its principal interest the differences in function between the left and right
hemispheres of the human brain and the impact that this difference has had on Western cultural history.
For McGilchrist, a significant problem in contemporary culture is the predominance of a left hemisphere
view of the world which makes it much more difficult for care to take centre stage in human life. Care is
a defining feature of the right hemisphere:

17
 . . .belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The
right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care:
it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus
if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you,
but can’t be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that
entails me in certain ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility
of certain ways of acting and being as well. . .It has the characteristic right hemisphere qualities of being a
betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship in which each party is altered by the other
and by the relationship between the two.36

The implications for education could not be more obvious, but to hammer the point home, let’s see
McGilchrist’s presentation of what a predominantly left hemisphere view of the world would look like:

We could expect, for a start, that there would be a loss of the broader picture, and a substitution of a more
narrowly focussed, restricted, but detailed, view of the world, making it perhaps difficult to maintain a coherent
overview. The broader picture would in any case be disregarded, because it would lack the appearance of
clarity and certainty which the left hemisphere craves. . .The concepts of skill and judgment, once considered
the summit of human achievement, but which come only slowly and silently with the business of living, would
be discarded in favour of quantifiable and repeatable processes. . .more and more work would come to be
overtaken by the meta-processes of documenting or justifying what one was doing or supposed to be doing –
at the expense of the real job in the living world.37

Because the left hemisphere plays the important role of breaking things down into constituent parts
and grasping them, it has a tendency towards atomisation and control. This ability is of enormous
importance in dealing with complex and inanimate objects or processes, but it falls short of humanity
unless it is reintegrated and transformed by the right hemisphere and its understanding of persons,
care, interconnectedness, metaphor, uncertainty, emotion, intuition and feeling. A eudaimonic,
caring account of education is one which can sublimate helping children to achieve into the primary
purpose of enabling them to lead a fulfilling life in which virtues have been developed.
Paulo Freire echoes these sentiments in his description of the ‘banking’ metaphor of education. He
describes the ‘narration sickness’ of didactic systems of educating which consist simply of students who
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

receive, file and store deposits of knowledge bestowed upon them by their teacher. Freire’s description
of this model has much in common with McGilchrist’s presentation of the left hemisphere view of the
world, as Freire explains here:

The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on
a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving
objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative
power.38

Freire’s solution is what he terms problem-posing education. The key feature of this approach is that
the illusory division between teacher and pupil disappears and, through dialogue, a new relationship

18
appears: the teacher – student and the student—teacher: in McGilchrist’s language a ‘relationship in
which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two.’ For Freire, education
properly conducted is humanism. Education liberates us and enables us to become fully human, but
only if it is done on the understanding that all of us involved in it are incomplete and unfinished beings
who exist as part of an incomplete and unfinished reality.
This sense of being works in progress returns us to Aristotle and to eudaimonism. The process of
the development of virtue is predicated upon a view of ourselves as works in progress, right up until
the moment of our death. It also requires us to exist in relation with others who enable us to develop
virtue and who, in turn, are engaged in their own process of developing virtue. All of this, especially the
existential uncertainty of it all, demands of us that we exist in a relationship of care to one another, and
it is this care which underpins our humanity.

Conclusion
In a blog post for the Times Educational Supplement, teacher Tom Bennett recounts a conversation with
a friend who describes his reasons for leaving the teaching profession:

’Accountability and data,’ he said. ‘I came into this job because I love teaching children; because I see them
as people who need the best start in life we can give them. They’re all sons and daughters, and they’re in my
room because I’m supposed to help them learn and understand. And now they aren’t children. They’re units.
The school sees each examinable cohort as a set of targets; the ones who look like they’ll meet that target get
ignored, and the ones who might, get all the attention. And the ones who probably won’t get their levels and C
grades. . .the ones who need us most. . .get the scrapheap.’39

Bennett then comments: ‘I assured him that there were plenty of schools out there that didn’t see
children as dots on a scatter graph; that still believed in education for its own sake and to Hell with the
child-catchers of bureaucracy. I just don’t know how many.’
In this chapter I have attempted to reassure Edward Bear that there really is another way of coming

The place of well-being and happiness in education

down the stairs: a way of thinking about education which might enable us to sublimate the corrosive
obsession with achievement into something humanistic and more meaningful. It may be argued that,
in doing so, I have created a straw man of results-obsessed schools and that in reality school leaders
are already combining the achievement of results with a holistic vision for education. This may well
be true, but I would suggest that we should be wary of marketing hyperbole and intellectual sleight
of hand. Schools may indeed make much of their efforts to teach to the whole child, but I worry that
too often this is a façade, and that, in practice, all school activities are subordinated to the acquisition
of results.
This sleight of hand may also extend to the introduction of a well-being ethos. Schools are not
oblivious to the stresses involved in accomplishing difficult academic feats, and many introduce well-
being measures to mitigate against the effects of academic pressure. In doing so however, they are
getting the tail to wag the dog and falling foul of the trap of confusing means and ends. Such an

19
 approach signals to young people that achievement is the end and that self-care only matters in so
far as it supports achievement. This is nonsense, and it is harmful to the long-term welfare of pupils
because it promotes the idea that humans are only valuable for what they produce, not for how well
they live. It also undermines the concept of well-being and suggests that it is something that is only
important when we are under pressure, rather than being a continuous process of mastering the
art of living a good human life. A eudaimonic account of education demands of us that we think of
educating for happiness and education as happiness: that we both explicitly teach how to live well and
that our entire educational efforts are aimed primarily at the achievement of happiness and human
flourishing.
In my view, a eudaimonic account of education and a retrieval of the language of virtue, character
and care can play the role of reassuring Edward Bear. In concerning ourselves with results, our attention
is narrowed to what pupils produce; in concerning ourselves with well-being our attention is widened to
who our pupils – and colleagues – are becoming and how their academic and other accomplishments
contribute to that. We see each individual as a work in progress and take care over our involvement in
their development of virtue and character across those four different domains: moral, civic, performance
and intellectual. The eudaimonic account may also help to overcome the fragmentation that occurs in
schools where performance tables introduce competition between people who, in reality, are all pulling
in the same direction. In that sense, eudaimonism may well be the unifying language that education is
calling for.
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

20
2 Space for well-being

Chapter preview
Education as happiness: how the curriculum contributes to eudaimonia 22
My World: Matthew Moss High School, Rochdale, UK 23
The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme 23
The relational in education 25
The emotional skills of teaching 26
Shame and pride 29
Restorative justice 31
Coaching 34
Applying restorative justice and coaching with colleagues 36

Introduction
Let us return to our friend Edward Bear. You will recall that at the beginning of Chapter 1, the poor
fellow was having his stuffing assaulted as Christopher Robin dragged him down the stairs by his paw,
and he was desperate for a glimmer of hope that there might be another way of coming down the
stairs. I think that, metaphorically, we have given this to him. For all of us Edward Bears in education,
the eudaimonic-care philosophy of education could well be the alternative route that we have been
looking for. However, it is one thing to want to come down the stairs another way and quite another to
actually manage it.
In Chapter 1, I suggested that we should address two aspects of eudaimonism in schools: education
as happiness and educating for happiness; the former being a ‘whole-school’ approach to well-being and
the latter being discrete well-being lessons. This chapter deals with the former through two inseparable
areas: firstly, how the curriculum can be delivered in such a way as to promote virtue as its primary
outcome and secondly, how proper skill and care can be paid to the relational aspect of education.
The inseparability of the curriculum and the relational really matters. The late Chris Peterson, one of the
founding fathers of the Positive Psychology movement wrote about the idea of the ‘enabling institution’
in his book A Primer in Positive Psychology. An enabling institution for Peterson is one that is able to
bring about certain outcomes better than other institutions, and it does so because of enduring, moral
characteristics of the institution that contribute to human fulfilment, which he calls institutional-level
virtues.1 The emphasis on the moral characteristics of these institutions is vitally important. Factories can
increase profit and productivity by lowering pay and reducing breaks for workers, but by doing so they
will not contribute to human fulfilment because the workers are likely to be harmed by such practices.
 In the same way, schools can become extremely technically proficient at delivering a curriculum in
order to achieve better results, but they can do so in such a way that damages human relationships and
is disabling for the pupils.
My six-year-old daughter goes to a primary school which is an enabling institution and which
contributes to her fulfilment. Her need to learn and her drive to aspire are met by a skilfully-delivered
curriculum which makes her eager to learn. But this eagerness to learn is grounded in and enriched
by the moral characteristics of the school. Her teachers have high aspirations for the children which
are strengthened by kindness, integrity, patience and fairness: some of the institutional-level virtues
of the school. My daughter explores her learning in an environment which is enriched by supportive
relationships with her teachers and peers, and she is flourishing.
A eudaimonic school, therefore, not only pays close attention to how the curriculum itself develops
virtue, but also to how those intellectual virtues are enriched by the moral, relational virtues of the
learning community.

Education as happiness: how the curriculum contributes

to eudaimonia
For Guy Claxton, the delivery of a skilfully-crafted curriculum which enables young people to embark
on an ‘epistemic apprenticeship’ would go a long way towards securing young peoples’ happiness.
The epistemic apprenticeship involves the development of certain ‘learning muscles’ which Claxton
identifies as curiosity, courage, investigation, experimentation, imagination, reasoning, sociability and
reflection. The metaphor of developing learning muscles is akin to Julia Annas’ description of virtues
as skills which require practice, learning, understanding, autonomy, improvement, and in many cases,
a teacher. Claxton’s learning muscles are John White’s dispositions and Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. In
Claxton’s view, the epistemic apprenticeship and the development of intellectual virtues is thwarted by
the drive to maximise exam results. When school leaders and the teachers they manage become more
concerned with training and drilling children to pass exams, the learning muscles may atrophy because
they are not being truly stretched, as Claxton explains:
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

All too often the quest for results serves to undermine the foundations of self-confidence rather than to
strengthen them. Young people – some of them skilful exam-passers – become less curious as a result of their
education, not more. They lose their capacity for wonder and critical questioning. Rather than becoming
bolder and braver, they become more docile and fragile in the face of difficulty. They learn to think narrowly,
rather than broadly, to compete rather than cooperate, to be frightened of uncertainty and the risk of error that
accompanies it.2

If the intentions behind the delivery of the curriculum are wrong, it can be disabling and undermine the
acquisition of intellectual virtues. I would like to describe two examples of curricula that might hold the
key to recapturing the need to learn and the drive to aspire: My World at Matthew Moss High School
and the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme.

22
My World: Matthew Moss High School, Rochdale, UK
Aristotle tells us that the ‘good and wise [person] takes the most honourable course that circumstances
permit. . .[just as] a good shoemaker makes the neatest shoe out of the leather supplied to him.3 Like
Aristotle’s cobbler, there are schools making beautiful shoes out of undesirable leather. Matthew Moss
High School (MMHS) in Rochdale, UK, is an example of a school that has pushed right at the edges of
the National Curriculum to help children develop the intellectual virtues of a good learner and avoid the
epistemic atrophy that Claxton warns us about. The danger of a heavily-prescribed and heavily-tested
curriculum – such as the one that exists in the UK – is that it is easy for learning to be narrowed and
flattened to what is likely to be tested, potentially undermining the autonomy, curiosity and creativity of
the learner. Teachers at Matthew Moss have developed a project-based learning system called ‘My World’
which sits inside the National Curriculum, but which offers a very different experience of learning for
their students.4 It is driven along by a dispositional approach to learning which favours the acquisition
of intellectual virtues over the accumulation of content. The particular dispositions they use, taken from
Bristol University’s Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory are: strategic awareness; resilience; making
meaning; critical curiosity; creativity; learning relationships and changing and learning. Pupils identify
an area of learning they would like to embark upon, co-create a project with a teacher, identify goals
for their own learning and get on, at their own pace, with completing their project. As with the best of
project-based learning, such as AQA’s Extended Project Qualification5, the emphasis is on the process
and on what is learned about learning, rather than exclusively on what is produced at the end.

The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme

The work done at MMHS is powerful and innovative, but what would it be like if, unlike Aristotle’s cobbler
having to make do with sub-optimal leather, you could get hold of just the right material to work with?
One assessment framework that seems to offer children a genuine epistemic apprenticeship, rather
than just drill in exam success, is the International Baccalaureate, and in particular, its Middle Years
Programme or MYP, which pupils embark upon between the ages of 11 and 16.
The IB has a clearly-stated aim of education which is ‘to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring
young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding
and respect. [IB education] programmes encourage students across the world to become active,
compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can
also be right.’6 This aim of education is reached through the IB Learner Profile, which is a set of ten
intellectual virtues or attributes that all IB teachers and learners attempt to develop in participating in
the programme. The Learner Profile consists of striving to be inquirers, open-minded, knowledgeable,
caring, thinkers, risk-takers, communicators, balanced, principled and reflective.
Space for well-being

Although the IB aim of education is more a political one concerned with community building, rather
than an explicit focus on a clearly-delineated idea of human flourishing, this approach fits, without
too much chamfering, into the eudaimonic account of education I am presenting. We have a clearly
stated aim of education which is achieved through a focus on dispositions or virtues, just as John White

23
 recommends. Instead of emphasising exam results or bodies of knowledge, the IB emphasises human
growth and virtues through immersion in intellectual disciplines with an implicit aim of increasing human
happiness in its richest sense through peaceful societies.
What differentiates the MYP still further is its coherence as a philosophy of learning. The IB begins
with a structure of virtues, dispositions, principles and concepts. The curriculum is concept rather
than knowledge driven, which enables learners to imbue facts and knowledge with meaning which
cuts across disciplinary, personal, national and cultural boundaries. The IB identifies 16 concepts to be
explored across the curriculum such as aesthetics, change, logic, relationships and identity. A concept-
driven curriculum fits very well with the idea of eudaimonic education because of the way it sets children
up to be life-long learners, as the IB explains here:

A concept is a big idea—a principle or conception that is enduring, the significance of which goes beyond
aspects such as particular origins, subject matter or place in time. Concepts represent the vehicle for students’
inquiry into issues and ideas of personal, local and global significance, providing the means by which the
essence of a subject can be explored. Concepts have an essential place in the structure of knowledge. They
require students to demonstrate levels of thinking that reach beyond facts or topics. Concepts are used
to formulate the understandings that students should retain in the future; they become principles and
generalizations that students can use to understand the world and to succeed in further study and in life
beyond school.7

When it comes to the taught curriculum, the IB, bar some loose topic lists, allows schools to decide
their own curriculum content. It would, after all, be absurd for an organisation committed to a concept-
driven curriculum differentiated by context to then prescribe exactly what is taught. Schools determine
locally-relevant curricula across eight subject areas, and those children that sit terminal MYP exams are
invited to use their specific knowledge to address questions focused on concepts. This requires a great
deal more than the memory and regurgitation required in some examination systems.
The curriculum is also driven by what the IB terms ‘Approaches to Learning’ (ATL) and ‘Approaches
to Teaching’ (ATT). What distinguishes MYP learners from others is their ability to articulate their
personal understanding of how they learn and how they can become yet better learners. This goes
far beyond the neuro-mythology of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles8 and incorporates
communication, collaboration, self-management (including emotional, affective skill and reflection),
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

thinking and research. These approaches to learning are not mere ‘bolt-ons’ to subject delivery; they
are utterly central to the way the MYP is taught. When MYP learners’ progress is assessed, they are
expected to produce evidence of how the task they have completed has impacted upon their learning.
When MYP schools are inspected by the IB, they are expected to produce evidence of how ATL are
delivered through the curriculum. Of extreme significance for the eudaimonic model, is the presence
of the affective and the reflective in ATL. As mentioned below, affective, emotional skill goes hand in
hand with becoming virtuous, and as Julia Annas points out to us, being reflective is the entry point
for a life of virtue.9
ATL are cemented through the production of a personal project, an entirely pupil-led inquiry which
has resulted in such projects as: fictional love letters between a couple separated by the Berlin Wall
(accompanied by etchings and music); creation of a film; completion of the 3 Peaks Challenge (climbing

24
the 3 highest mountains in the UK); designing of clothes; putting on of a fashion show; persuading a
council to build a skate park; and a history of the Spanish Civil War through letters.
Interestingly, assessment through terminal exams in the MYP is optional. Although this means that
pupils not sitting the exams would not be certificated, this is not a problem in countries where 16+
certification is not the norm. The IB has created an assessment system with a clear end state, but where
the end state is not necessarily exam anxiety.
Also at the core of the MYP (as with the IB Diploma, taught post-16) are service and the community.
IB learners are expected to be committed to building communities through service: in the language
of the IB: ‘The IB aspires to empower people to be active learners who can empathize and pursue lives
of purpose and meaning, and who are committed to service. An IB education aims to develop the
consciousness, perspectives and competencies necessary for global engagement, as well as the personal
values that can lead to principled action and mutual understanding.’10 Not only are IB learners expected
to participate in a genuine epistemic apprenticeship which returns learning to a virtuous activity, but
that epistemic apprenticeship is rooted in a requirement for empathy, compassion and caring, and an
understanding that learning does not just serve our individual aspirations, but is responsibly applied in
communities by good people.

The relational in education

It is not new to argue that relationships matter [in education] but the body of evidence is now quite large and
powerful. We can conclude that the connections between people in schools are a driving force in shaping
engagement with school. This sense of belonging influences wellbeing, academic outcomes and social
development, short and long term. . .We can also conclude that relationships with teachers and pupils in
schools are potentially powerful for all pupils, and particularly so for the more emotionally vulnerable.11

This quote from Colleen MacLaughlin and Barbie Clarke signals the potential power of relationships
in education: potential, because all too often that power is not exploited, either through ignorance
or through incompetence. Eudaimonic education should be married to an ethics of care. Care ethics
places its emphasis on empathy and relationships, and any educational community which does not
see the relational as primary can only be partially successful. All learning happens in the context of a
relationship between teacher and learner, between learner and learner, and between learner and what is
learned. Really good learning happens when pupils respect, trust and are inspired by their teachers and
each other. If the learning relationship is dysfunctional, so will be the quality of the learning. Designing
engaging and innovative curricula is part of the process, but the very best of curricula can be mangled
by a teacher who cannot relate properly to those in her care.
In the early 2000s, newly-qualified teachers in the UK were told that they are teachers of literacy and
Space for well-being

numeracy, as well as their own subject. I would add that we are also teachers of relationships. If you
listen to the way that children talk about their teachers, they tend not to talk about the intricacies of their
subject knowledge: they take that for granted (until they have reason to question it). The conversations
instead, are about the character and virtues (or vices) of their teachers: how often they get angry and
shout, whether they are kind or harsh, whether they are funny, whether or not they are fair, how zealous

25
 they are about deadlines, how cynical they are, and so on. Our pupils look to us as role models in the
virtues of relationships, whether we like it or not. They observe how we manage conflict, how we deal
with individuals who have not come up to scratch in some way, and how we maintain good learning
environments in our classroom. Every little interpersonal interaction is observed and learned from. If we
get this right as teachers, if we can build strong and positive relationships with our pupils, we begin a
virtuous cycle of mutual support. The reciprocal nature of relationships makes personal fulfilment an
outcome of relating well to the children we teach.
The Foresight Report argues that ‘teachers who are stressed, or demoralised, make poor role models
for young people’12: this may sit uncomfortably with some teachers who feel (perhaps justifiably) that
their stress and demoralisation is a legitimate response to poor management and leadership practices in
their school. Without wishing to sound glib, it is incumbent upon teachers not to pass professional stress
and frustration on to their pupils. It is also incumbent upon school leadership not to put their teachers
in this position in the first place and Chapter 10 addresses this directly. As teachers, we must not forget
that we have a duty to show our pupils how to live skilfully; and to fail in this duty is to not show proper
care for them. For those of us who teach children who come from extremely disadvantaged or abusive
homes where children learn that it is OK to have low aspirations, to solve conflict with violence, or to
hide from the realities of life through drink or drugs, we may well be the only people in their lives who
can demonstrate how to strive, persevere, resolve conflict, self-manage, accomplish, empathise, or be
compassionate. Even though teaching can be profoundly stressful, our underlying duty is to make a
positive impact on the lives of our pupils by modelling the virtues of a good human life and the virtues
of good interpersonal relations.
The ethics of care and relationships in the context of school communities that I will sketch out
highlights three issues schools should consider. The first issue is that of emotional skill, with a particular
emphasis on the use of shame. The second issue is that of how to resolve conflict, which is an inevitable
and essential ingredient of human relationships. The third issue is that of how to adopt a stance to
teacher pupil relations which enables our students to identify and work towards their goals and develop
virtue in a way that respects their autonomy.

The emotional skills of teaching

Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

The Foresight Report states that ‘the use of negativity, sarcasm and verbal punitiveness with young
children is particularly damaging and high or sustained directiveness (i.e. directing a child away from
their focus of interest to what the carer thinks they should be doing) and restrictedness (e.g. “stop
doing that”, “come away from that”, “leave that alone”) show significant negative impacts on later social,
cognitive and academic developmental outcomes.’13 These remarks relate to early years and primary
care, but have real relevance in secondary education too, where pupil autonomy and relationships free
from sarcasm, verbal punitiveness and aggression are just as important.
The significance of relationships for learning was sketched out by John Holt in the late 1950s and
1960s in two magnificent books How Children Fail and How Children Learn. His central premise was that
learning is a natural state for children, and that they are not only extremely good at it, but that they

26
desire to do it. This presents us with something of a paradox: if a child’s natural state is to learn, then why
do some children choose not to do it in the very place which is supposedly dedicated to learning? Holt’s
answer was that when children’s natural desire to learn is not visible, it is because it is stifled by the way
the teacher or the school as a whole relates to the learner(s):

I began to wonder, more intuitively than consciously, how I might help to make a class in which children free of
danger from me and each other, might once again, as when they were little, reach out hungrily to reality.14

Throughout his books – elements of which seem ahead of their time even today – Holt explores how
the way in which teachers relate to students impacts upon their ability to love learning. Dysfunctional
learning relationships, for Holt, begin with the assumption on the part of some teachers that children
cannot be trusted, which is based on thoughts such as ‘children are no good, they won’t learn unless
we make them’, ‘the world is no good, children must be broken to it’ and ‘I had to put up with it, why
shouldn’t they?’15 This lack of trust may stem from different pressures on teachers, such as lack of
experience, poor personal experience of education, or excessive pressure to achieve results coupled
with a desperate desire to avoid ‘failure.’ As soon as teachers fail to trust their pupils, classrooms change.
Teachers become much more controlling of outcomes (because ‘children can’t get there on their own’),
teachers value what Holt calls ‘producers’ – the children who produce the answers the teachers want
to hear – and in turn, lessons become about ‘answer pulling’. Exploration is closed down, because the
outcomes of exploration cannot be guaranteed; children are not given the freedom to generate their
own questions and expand their curiosity, and children become concerned with pleasing adults, rather
than autonomously exploring reality in new ways. At this point, Holt argues, the sharp line between
success and failure appears – accompanied by fear – as opposed to the real nature of learning, which
should be about effort and adventure.16 Holt’s arguments in many ways presage the arguments given
by Claxton in What’s the point of school? and fundamentally challenge the assumptions we make about
pupils and how those assumptions affect how we relate to them, as Holt writes:

What happens is that [learning and intellectual growth] is destroyed, and more than by any other one thing,
by the process that we misname education – a process that goes on in most homes and schools. We adults
destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do or make them do. We
destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not
pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong. Thus we make them afraid to gamble, afraid to
experiment, afraid to try the difficult and the unknown. Even when we do not create children’s fears, when they
come to us with fears ready-made and built-in, we use these fears as handles to manipulate them and get
them to do what we want.

For Holt the solutions lie in eliminating fear and then helping children out of the bad thinking habits that
Space for well-being

this fear has created – fear created by a desire to please adults rather than learn. This can only be done
through a particular kind of dialogical relationship built upon the teacher’s willingness to learn alongside
her pupils. Holt’s writing is full of warmth, empathy and a desire to learn about himself through his
interactions with the children he teaches. He shows us not only that it is possible, but that it is essential
to strike the right balance between personal connection and professional boundaries; maintaining

27
 warmth and healthy authority. This idea is also present in the writings of Paulo Freire, who argues that
for true learning to take place, there must be a change in our understanding of the relationship between
teacher and pupil, what Freire describes as ‘teacher – student’ and ‘student – teacher’. For Freire, as for
Holt, this relationship can only emerge from dialogical relations based upon a foundation of trust:

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the-students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term
emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but
one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.17

A school taking eudaimonism and an ethics of care seriously would have to place a central emphasis
on the emotional skill with which teachers and students navigate their way through their relationships
with each other through skilful use of dialogue, pivoting upon that beautiful point made by Freire
wherein teaching and learning are fully reciprocal. Maria Arpa explains the meaning of dialogue
further here:

A dialogue is defined as a very specific type of open-ended conversation in which the cornerstones are
collaboration and goodwill. The aim of dialogue is to decide a way forward that works for everyone, based
on common ground. A debate on the other hand, is a form of competition where the participants put their
best idea or proposal forward and try to get everyone on their side. No matter how polite the conversation is,
and how many gracious manners are displayed, if the intention is to impose a view on someone else, it is a
debate.18

For Arpa, who is an expert in mediation and restorative approaches to conflict and who has worked with
some of the most violent offenders in UK prisons and abroad, dialogue avoids the central problem of
debate. Because debates are competitive and result in a winner, disgruntlement or worse is an inevitable
outcome: as she puts it: ‘I might win the immediate battle, but the war still rages.’ Because dialogue
is open-ended and hinges upon everyone either having their voice heard through collaboration, or
assenting to the outcome by goodwill, this problem may be mitigated to some degree. To add to this,
if, as Holt and Freire both suggest, the approaches taken by teachers – and indeed by students – create
relationships that are more concerned with power, authority, fear and outcomes than with genuine
learning, the acquisition of virtue by autonomous moral agents cannot truly begin. The acquisition
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

of virtue depends upon phronesis; rational judgement and decision making based upon reflection: if
children are simply told what to do, they do not develop virtue but unthinking obedience to authority.
Or they resist.
Of course, when it comes to curricula with prescribed content, you might be forgiven for arguing that
the place of dialogue is restricted at best. How is it possible, you might ask, to allow room for dialogue
when there is content to cover? I think that this creates a false dichotomy. Syllabuses and specifications
don’t prescribe the way to teach, and it is possible to approach specified content as mysteries to be
solved, rather than facts to be delivered. Some subjects do lend themselves more obviously to dialogue,
especially those which contain a large element of interpretation such as literature, art or history. But
dialogue is as much an attitude to relationships with students as it is a technique for bringing about
good learning. If students know, even in those times where prescribed content has to be covered, that

28
the channels of dialogue are open with their teacher and with fellow learners, the quality of relationships
within the classroom will be so much the better.

Shame and pride

Open dialogue offers tremendous opportunities for the development of virtue because of its requirement
for good judgement across all four domains of virtue (moral, intellectual, performance and civic). To
allow room for dialogue in a classroom requires emotional skill, and in turn, emotional skill enables us to
develop virtue, as explained here by Kristján Kristjánsson:

. . .emotions are more central than actions to who we are: . . .we are what we feel rather than what we do. In
my account, selfhood is essentially created through and sustained by certain deep, self-conscious background
emotions, most specifically pride and shame, which inform all our evaluative stances towards ourselves and
others. These emotions incorporate a moral dimension as they form constitutive parts of our fundamental
virtues and vices: states of character that determine who we are ‘deep down.’19

Kristjánsson singles out pride and shame for attention and this is important in educational settings
too. Pride as an emotion has come in for a bit of a beating throughout Western culture, notably
in the Christian tradition, as a relic of the myth of The Fall in the book of Genesis. The accepted
interpretation of Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God is that it stemmed from pride, from their
belief that they could know the mind of God and be his equal. Pride tends to be conflated with
arrogance, smugness and hubris, but this misses not only what pride actually is, but undermines its
importance for human flourishing. For psychologist Donald Nathanson, healthy pride is experienced
when 3 conditions are met:

(1) A purposeful, goal-directed, intentional activity is undertaken while under the influence of the affect
interest-excitement; (2) this activity must be successful in achieving its goal; following which (3) the
achievement of the goal suddenly releases the individual from the preceding effort and the affect that
accompanies and amplifies it, thus triggering enjoyment-joy. In short, healthy pride involves. . .competence
pleasure when our competence has been tested in an atmosphere of excitement.20

‘Affect’ is the strictly biological element of the emotion; it is all of the ingredients of the emotion that
can be observed physiologically. For example, the affect enjoyment-joy will result in the eyes opening
wide and smile emerging. Skilful teachers enable the experience of pride in their students regularly
and, as Kristjánsson argues, those students develop their sense of self and their virtues through having
these experiences. Healthy pride is not sinful – far from it – it is utterly central to human flourishing.
Space for well-being

As children encounter uncertainty and challenges where they can test and extend their competence,
the pride that they experience – intrinsic to that experience, free of excessive praise – is what will
enable them to pick up the next challenge and also to persevere when their competence is not up
to the challenge set. Where there is high directedness and lack of dialogue, these opportunities are
reduced.

29
 Shame is the normal emotional response to a situation where our desire outruns our sense of
fulfilment21; it is an inbuilt system that pulls us away from something that was provoking our interest,
but which we now realise we can’t have. Imagine seeing a person from a distance that you recognise.
You raise your arm to acknowledge them and are about to shout an enthusiastic greeting, when you
realise that you are mistaken and it is in fact a complete stranger. Your arm falls straightaway and you
stumble over your words and you cast your eyes down to avoid their gaze. Alternatively, imagine a
classroom where homework is being returned. A boy is proud of the work that he did and expects
some positive feedback from his teacher. The work comes back covered in red ink and with a low mark.
His instinctive affective response will be the loss of interest and excitement. This shame response is
unavoidable, and it is very powerful. According to Nathanson, once we find ourselves in a state of
shame, we can respond in any of four ways. We can attack ourselves for our perceived failure; we can
attack others for our perception of their contribution; we can withdraw and try to hide; or we can avoid
and try to mask our feelings of shame, perhaps through alcohol or thrill-seeking. Nathanson calls this
the ‘compass of shame’ and it is absolutely fundamental to any understanding of human relationships,
not least those involving learning or mastery of a discipline. As soon as I indicate to a pupil that their
learning or their behaviour does not match expectations, they will experience shame. Our job as
teachers is to help our students to navigate their way through the shame that they experience, so that
they can emerge from it and learn.
Of course, shaming comes in different forms. The description above is predominantly of what John
Bradshaw calls ‘healthy shame.’22 Healthy shame helps us to know our limits and to know that we can
make mistakes and it comes in the context of a relationship built on trust. Bradshaw distinguishes this
from ‘toxic shame’, which is the kind of humiliating treatment that leads to people believing “I am flawed
and defective as a human being”. It is sadly not uncommon to see parents openly humiliating and
shaming their children in order to extract conformity to some behavioural ideal, often as a consequence
of the parent’s own inability to cope with their child being ‘naughty’ in public. Healthy shame, where we
mark out certain limits for each other in the context of trust and love is vital. Toxic shame and humiliation
is profoundly damaging.
There is, predictably, debate about the role that shame should play in education. Some will
instinctively recoil from any suggestion that shame should be used deliberately as a learning tool.
Shaming immediately opens up the potential for one person to manipulate another, and some may
feel that the use of shame to modify behaviour in some way is an abuse of power on the part of the
Teaching Happiness and Well-being in Schools

teacher and an unacceptable use of control. Kristján Kristjánsson cites evidence from the other side
of the debate suggesting that emotions such as shame can provide powerful extrinsic motivators to
students to overcome failure in the future.23 I would question the suggestion that shame might be used
in this way for three reasons. The first is that extrinsic forms of motivation seem to be problematic, and
I have more to say about this in Chapter 7. Secondly, Nathanson describes how we each develop a sort
of fingerprint of shame unique to us:

Over and over I have stated that people differ both in their descriptions and their apparent experience of
shame. Who we are is dependent on how we got to be us – each of us is the product of our development.
How we experience and identify shame is contingent on the importance to us of the situation in which the
attenuator of shame affect is triggered.24

30
Other documents randomly have
different content
 "Marriage," said the sage, "is the right state for man, because it is only
through marriage that he can fulfil his destiny upon earth; there is
therefore nothing more honourable, nothing more worthy of his serious
consideration than his power of fulfilling exactly all duties. Amongst these
are some shared in common by both sexes, others which are to be
performed by each sex in particular. The man is the head, it is for him to
command; the woman is subject to him, it is for her to obey. It is the
function of both together to imitate those operations of the heaven and the
earth which combine in the production, the support, and the preservation
of all things. Reciprocal tenderness, mutual confidence, truthfulness and
respect, should form the foundation of their conduct; instruction and
direction on the part of the husband, docility and complaisance on the part
of the woman, in everything which does not interfere with the requirements
of justice, propriety, and honour.
"As society is now constituted, the CHINESE
WIDOWS
woman owes all that she is to her
husband. If death takes him from her, it does not
make her her own mistress. As a daughter, she was
under the authority of her father and mother, or
failing them of the brothers older than herself; as a
wife she was ruled by her husband as long as he
lived; as a widow she is under the surveillance of her
son, or if she has several sons, of the eldest of them,
and this son, whilst ministering to her with all
possible affection and respect, will shield her from all
the dangers to which the weakness of her sex might
expose her. Custom does not permit second marriage
to a widow, but prescribes on the contrary that she
should seclude herself within the precincts of her own
house, and never leave it again all the rest of her life.
FIG. 29.—A YOUNG She is forbidden to attend to any business, no matter
CHINESE
MARRIED LADY.
what, outside her home. As a result she ought not to
understand any such business; she will not even
meddle in domestic matters unless compelled to do
so by necessity, that is to say, whilst her children are still young. During the
day she should avoid showing herself, by refraining from going from room
to room, unless obliged to do so. And during the night the room in which
she sleeps should always be lit up. Only by leading a retired life such as this
will she win amongst her descendants the glory of having fulfilled the
duties of a virtuous woman."
It would indeed be difficult for a widow to live up to such an ideal as
this, and that the Chinese themselves realize the fact, is proved by their
raising monuments to the memory of those who succeed.
"I have already said," adds Confucius, "that between fifteen and twenty
is the age at which a girl should change her state by marriage. As on this
change of state depends the happiness or misery in which she will pass the
rest of her days, nothing should be neglected to procure for her a proper
establishment, and the most advantageous one permitted by
circumstances. Special care should be taken not to allow her to enter a
family which has taken part in any conspiracy against the State, or in any
open revolt, or into one whose affairs are in disorder, or which is agitated
by internal dissensions. She should not have a husband chosen for her who
has been publicly dishonoured by any crime bringing him under the notice
of the law; to a man suffering from any chronic complaint, any mental
eccentricity, any bodily deformity, such as would make it difficult to get on
with him, or render him repulsive or disagreeable, or to a man who is the
eldest of a family but has neither father nor mother. With the exception of
these five classes of men, a husband may be chosen for her from any rank
of society, with whom it will depend on herself alone whether she passes
her life happily or not. She has but to fulfil exactly all the duties of her new
state to enjoy the portion of bliss destined for her."
It is the parents who decide who their children shall marry, and a young
Chinaman does not know his fiancée until the day of his wedding. This
explains why Confucius thought it necessary to go into all these details on
the subject of suitable husbands.
"A husband," he adds, "has the right to put away his wife, REASONS FOR
DIVORCE
but he must not use this right in an arbitrary manner; he must
have some legitimate cause for enforcing it. The legitimate causes of
repudiation reduce themselves to seven: The first when a woman cannot
live in harmony with her father- or mother-in-law; the second, if she is
unable to perpetuate the race because of her recognized sterility; the third,
if she be justly suspected of having violated conjugal fidelity, or if she gives
any proof of unchastity; the fourth, if she bring trouble into her home by
calumnious or indiscreet reports; the fifth, if she have; any infirmity such as
every man would naturally shrink from; the sixth, if it is difficult to correct
her of the use of intemperate language; the seventh, if unknown to her
husband she steals anything secretly in the house, no matter from what
motive.
"Although any one of these reasons is sufficient to authorize a husband
to put away his wife, there are three circumstances which forbid him to use
his right: the first, when his wife has neither father nor mother, and would
have nowhere to go to; the second, when she is in mourning for her father-
or mother-in-law, for three years after the death of either of them; the
third, when her husband, having been poor when he married her, has
subsequently become rich."

FIG. 30.—A MARRIAGE PROCESSION.

Truly there is much wisdom in the counsels of Confucius on the vexed

subject of marriage, but it is impossible to help feeling that the very low
view he took of the position of women detracts greatly from the merit of
the discourse quoted above. We are, in fact, inclined to endorse the opinion
of the missionary Gutzlaff, who, speaking of the revered sage, remarks: "By
not giving a proper rank in society to females, by denying to them the
privileges which are their due as sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters ...
he has marred the harmony of social life, and put a barrier against the
improvement of society. The regeneration of China will, in fact, never take
place, unless the females be raised from the degraded state which
Confucius assigned to them."
On yet another exciting topic, that of suicide, it will perhaps SUICIDE

be salutary to relate one anecdote illustrating the view the reformer took of
the matter, now that so many despairing souls have lost the aids and
consolations of religious faith in struggling with the difficulties of their life
on earth; when followers of the stoical and heroic Zeno are becoming rarer
and rarer, and so many young men and women resort to the fumes of
charcoal, or to the waters of the nearest river, to put an end to the woes
they have not the courage to face. We must premise, however, that there is
really far more excuse for an Asiatic to take his own life than for a
European, there being nothing unreasonable about it according to the
doctrine of Buddha, whose disciples believe firmly in the transmigration of
souls. They do not, it is true, profess to know whether, if they commit
suicide they will become animals, but they are firmly convinced that they
will continue to live, whereas the atheist has faith in nothingness alone.
In one of his many journeys Confucius and his
disciples met a man who was trying to strangle
himself with a rope. When asked what his motives
were for wishing to commit suicide, he replied that
he had been a bad son, a bad father, and a bad
citizen. The remorse he felt for the terrible
character his self-examination revealed him to be
from all these three points of view, had made his
life odious to him, and he had come out to a lonely
place to put an end to it.
Greatly shocked, Confucius reproved him,
addressing him in the following terms: "However
great the crimes you have committed, the worst of
all of them is yielding to despair. All the others may
FIG. 31.—A DESPERATE be allowed, but that is irremediable. You have, no
MAN. doubt, gone astray from the very first steps you
took upon earth. You should have begun by being
a man of ordinary worth before attempting to
distinguish yourself You cannot attain to being an eminent person until you
have strictly fulfilled the duty imposed by nature on every human creature.
You ought to have begun by being a good son; to love and serve those to
whom you owed your being was the most essential of your obligations; you
neglected to do so, and from that negligence have resulted all your
misfortunes.
SPEECH OF
CONFUCIUS

FIG. 32.—THE TOMB OF CONFUCIUS.

(Univers Pittoresque.)

"Do not, however, suppose that all is lost; take courage again, and try
to become convinced of a truth which all past centuries have proved to be
incontestable. This is the truth I refer to; treasure it up in your mind, and
never lose hold of it: As long as a man has life, there is no reason to
despair of him; he may pass suddenly from the greatest trouble to the
greatest joy, from the greatest misfortune to the greatest felicity. Take
courage once more, return home, and strive to turn to account every
instant, as if you began to-day for the first time to realize the value of life."
Then turning to the younger of his disciples, Confucius said to them:
"What you have heard from the lips of this man is an excellent lesson for
you—reflect seriously upon it, every one of you."
After this remonstrance it is said that thirteen of the followers of the
sage left him to return home and perform their filial duties. The Celestials,
in fact, all agree in saying that filial piety was alike the groundwork of the
Confucian philosophy and the foundation of Chinese society. In spite of
much that is strange to European ideas, might we not well follow many of
the precepts of the enlightened pre-Christian teacher?
 CHAPTER V
My voyage to Macao—General appearance of the port—Gambling propensities of the
Chinese—Compulsory emigration—Cruel treatment of coolies on board ship—Disaster on
the Paracelses reefs—The Baracouns—The grotto of Camoens—The Lusiads—Contrast
between Chinese and Japanese—Origin of the yellow races: their appearance and
language—Relation of the dwellers in the Arctic regions to the people of China—Russian
and Dutch intercourse with the Celestials—East India Company's monopoly of trade—
Disputes on the opium question—Expiration of charter—Death of Lord Napier of a broken
heart—Lin-Tseh-Hsu as Governor of the Kwang provinces—The result of his measures to
suppress trade in opium—Treaty of Nanking—War of 1856-1858—Treaty of Tien-tsin and
Convention of Pekin—Immense increase in exports and imports resulting from them.

I had confided to M. Vaucher, that most amiable of cicerones whom I

had been fortunate enough to meet at Canton, my great wish to go to
Macao and make a pilgrimage to the grotto where it is said Camoens, the
great Portuguese poet, wrote a portion of his most important work, the
Lusiads. M. Vaucher at once made arrangements for me to go to the
celebrated Portuguese settlement by river and sea, and placed one of his
own decked boats at my disposal. He even went so far as to choose a crew
for me, and to arm that crew with six rifles. Before I started he warned me
to keep in my cabin so as not to arouse the cupidity of the banditti, who
abound on the river, by appearing on deck.
"If," he said to me, "my men point out to you a suspicious-looking craft,
be on your guard against it. You may easily," he added, "recognize pirate
boats for yourself, for this reason, they always prowl about in groups of
three, so that each may help the others in case of bad weather or any
difficulty; a clever arrangement greatly facilitating their evil designs, for the
crews are rapidly transformed from harmless fishermen to fierce pirates
should occasion serve for doing a stroke of business."
In spite of these ominous warnings, however, my voyage passed over
without incident, and I arrived safely at the port of Macao, situated on the
southern extremity of a small peninsula of the island of Hiang-shang and
separated from the Chinese province of Canton merely by a wall, which is
in as ruinous a condition as is the more celebrated Great Wall of Tartary. As
we approached Macao a beautiful scene was spread out before us, wooded
hills dotted with charming villas, in which the wealthy English of Hong-Kong
spend much of the summer, and groups of picturesque rocks rising from
the curving shores of the lovely bay with its stretch of gleaming white sand,
to which the Portuguese, to whom Macao was ceded by the Chinese, have
given the appropriate name of the Porto de Praya grande.
Here swarms the teeming amphibious fishing population of Macao, and
from this perfect bow with its picturesque surroundings were shipped, alas!
for all too many years, thousands of coolies for the labour market of
Havana and Peru, who were many of them embarked under terribly tragic
circumstances.
A true Celestial is in fact a born gambler, and indulges his EMIGRATION
AGENTS
instincts to such an extent that when he has lost fortune, wife,
and daughters he finally stakes himself! This fact is well known to the
emigration agents not only of Macao, but of the other Chinese ports, where
numbers were formerly enrolled for service in Peru, Chili, the Philippine
Islands, and various places in Oceania with very little, if any, volition on
their own part. Emigration agents used to lie in wait for Chinese loungers,
and accost those who looked fairly robust politely, take them to the flower-
boats and other public resorts where opium was smoked, and if their
luckless victims still had any money left, their insinuating tempters would
entice them into some low gambling hell, where, after a few throws of the
dice, the ruin of the simple, confiding fellows was complete. Then when the
unfortunate Celestials had emptied their purses, and their brains were
muddled with opium or from the effects of debauchery, their dim eyes were
dazzled by the offer of a few piastres, and in exchange for a trifling sum
they signed away their liberty. When they came to their senses they found
they had bound themselves to leave their country.
The agents were careful when they got the poor fellows' signatures not
to let out how far from China were the sugar-cane plantations of the
Antilles or the guano isles of Peru. Their victims had only learnt one fact
thoroughly, and that was that their country is the centre of the universe,
the foreign nations surrounding it being looked upon as its tributaries. If
the emigrants asked where they were going, they were told to some place
very near the port of embarkation. This wicked deception was really the
cause of the terrible massacres of coolies to which many captains of
emigrant vessels were driven to save their ships and crews. When after a
few days' voyage a vessel had to touch at some port for any reason, and
the poor coolies packed away below the hatchways saw above the barriers
or through the portholes, the bright verdure of an island of Oceania, or the
distant blue mountains of the American continent, they at once jumped to
the conclusion that their journey was at an end, and were wild to leave the
vessel, no matter at what cost. Some even in mid-ocean, out of sight of
land, became so heart-broken from home-sickness that they quietly packed
up the few things belonging to them and jumped into the sea with them.
Now and then a few of these would-be suicides were fished out again by
order of the captain, and would calmly explain their action by some such
speech as this: "We want to go back to our own country." Truly those who
believe in metempsychosis cherish wonderful delusions!
On one occasion in the roadstead of Manila a swarm of coolies who
thought they had arrived at Havana mutinied because the captain would
not allow them to land. The crew of the vessel drove them back between
decks at the point of the sword, and they all perished from suffocation in a
few hours for want of air.
Mutiny on their part was not, however, the only reason CATASTROPHE
A TERRIBLE

which sometimes led to the sacrifice of a whole cargo of

Asiatics. It was all too often a case of might makes right, and when some
convulsion of the elements rendered it imperative to lighten a vessel, many
a captain easily persuaded himself that he had no choice but to save his
crew by the sacrifice of his human freight. This was the cause of the awful
catastrophe off the Paracelses reefs in the China Sea, which have as
sinister a reputation as the Goodwin Sands of the English coast, or the Baie
des Trépassés of that of Brittany. An unskilful captain had run his
vessel on to the far-famed reefs during the night, and seeing that it was
hopeless to attempt to save the five hundred coolies he was to have taken
to Peru, he called his crew together and told them to lower all the boats as
quietly as possible. This was done, and the captain saved himself and his
sailors, leaving the five hundred Celestials to their fate. The unfortunate
coolies, roused from their sleep by the bumping of the vessel against the
rocks, uttered piercing screams for help from the narrow space in which
they were confined, but we need scarcely add that the cautious captain had
most likely had the hatchways securely nailed down by his carpenter before
he left the ship.
When there is not much sea on, the Paracelses reefs can be clearly
seen, certain flat portions emerging here and there for a few inches above
the surface of the water. If there were never such a thing as a storm, and
no danger of the islets being swept by the waves, it would be possible to
live on them and even to support life by feeding on the turtles and shell-
fish abounding there; so that if the poor abandoned coolies had been able
to get out of their prison, who can tell but what they might have saved
themselves by clinging to the rocks till help arrived? As it was, however, not
a single emigrant was ever seen again. On the arrival safe and sound at
Hong-Kong of the captain and his crew, the English authorities at once sent
the fleetest steamer in the port to the scene of the shipwreck, but those on
that steamer saw nothing of the lost vessel, which must have been quickly
dashed to pieces. The Paracelses reefs were completely under water,
masses of surging foam hiding all trace of them, so that had any of the
coolies landed it would only have been to be swept quickly away to the
open sea by the force of the current.
Perhaps the saddest part of the tragedy was that the fate of so many
human creatures who had disappeared for ever in the depths of that blind
and reckless destroyer, the Ocean, should have raised so little regret, either
amongst the white-skinned traders in human flesh or the yellow-faced
Celestials of Macao and Hong-Kong. Maybe the latter themselves realize
that they really are too prolific, and are not sorry when their numbers are
lessened, no matter by what means.
When I was at Macao, I saw some of the so-called THE BARACOUNS
baracouns, where the emigrants used to be shut up whilst awaiting their
embarcation. These baracouns are the disused vaults of old convents,
damp cellars of vast extent, which were closed with strong bars when in
use as pens for human cattle. I am thankful to say these barracks are
empty now, and are no longer hot-beds of disease, for the European
powers have interfered to put a stop to the infamous traffic. It is a great
gratification to me to know, on the authority of the Quai d'Orsay officials,
that an indignant article on the subject, which I contributed to the Revue
des Deux Mondes, had something to do with this most desirable step.
Emigration still goes on, on a very large scale, but it is conducted in a
less barbarous manner. No Chinese can now be made to embark against his
will, and his signature to a contract no longer compels him to leave his
native land if he has any means of support. As time goes on, it is to be
hoped that something like true liberty will really be the heritage of the
Chinese people, and already, where European ideas are gaining ground,
there are glimmerings of the dawn of a better state of things.
In China, as elsewhere, the glory of the Portuguese colonies is
departed, and the settlement at Macao is no exception to the rule. For
many years the name of that port was synonymous with decay and
degradation. The native population was more debased; the foreign traders
were more grasping, more greedy of gain, and more reckless of the means
employed to secure it than anywhere else, and one tri-colour flag, floating
above a hospital for invalid sailors, was the only note of true civilization to
redeem a deplorable state of things. The Sisters of Charity, who had come
all the way from France to soothe the sufferings of European mariners in a
strange land, taught the people of Macao that there was another love than
that of the piastre, another intoxication than that produced by the fumes of
opium: the love of helping others, the intoxication of zeal for humanity. The
much-abused and hated Macao is now the seat of a bishop and the head-
quarters of French missionary effort in China, whilst the export trade has
passed from the hands of the Portuguese into that of the British, a truly
beneficent change for all concerned.
My visit to the horrible baracouns made me quite miserable, so vividly
did they bring before me all the horrors of the but recently-changed system
of compulsory emigration. I did my best to forget them; and on the eve of
my departure from Macao I went to see the grotto associated with the
name of Camoens. It will be remembered that the poet was banished to
Macao in 1556 on account of his quarrel with the authorities at Goa,
whither he had been sent after the fracas in the streets of Lisbon, in which
he wounded a royal equerry. He seems on the whole to have enjoyed his
exile, for he obtained a post with a large salary, and in two years made
quite a fortune. This so-called grotto is not really a cave now, whatever it
may originally have been, but is a picturesque little building perched on a
site commanding a beautiful view of the bay and its shipping. Truly a fitting
scene to inspire the rhapsody in which Camoens celebrated the glory of his
fellow-countryman, Vasco da Gama, and bemoaned the sad fate of the
beautiful Iñez de Castro, who, the story goes, after being for some ten
years the mistress of the Infante of Portugal, Dom Pedro, was secretly
married to him in 1354, and murdered by order of her father-in-law in
1355. When the bereaved husband came to the throne he put two of the
murderers of his bride to death by torture; and, according to Camoens, had
the dead body of Iñez exhumed, dressed in royal robes, and placed upon
the throne she would have occupied had she lived, to receive homage from
the court.
In the Lusiads, which has been called the "Epos of THE LUSIADS
Commerce," and is to the Portuguese what Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is to
the English, a vivid picture is given of the grandeur of the poet's native
country in the fifteenth century, when it was the rival of Spain, and a leader
in the colonization of distant lands. Perhaps one of the finest passages of
this remarkable poem, or series of poems, is that in which its author
invokes the mighty spirit of the storm, Adamastor, the fierce guardian of
the Cape of Good Hope, over whom Vasco da Gama and Magellan, also of
Portuguese birth, both triumphed. Now that time has proved how fatal to
the real welfare of both Spain and Portugal was the wealth of India and of
Mexico, one cannot help feeling that the poet may perhaps have had
something of a prophetic intuition of the future decadence of the peninsular
kingdoms, when he placed a giant in the pathway of the Conquistadores, to
bar the way against them.
It has only been for the last forty years that either China or Japan can
be said to have been open to Europeans. The history of the latter nation is
a proof of what an active, brave, and intelligent people may achieve in the
course of a few years; whilst that of the former illustrates all that may
remain undone where the natives of a country are convinced that they
have for forty centuries had an ideal government, the best possible religion,
and that the products of their industries are quite incapable of
improvement.
In passing judgment on the Chinese it must, however, be borne in mind
that their country is, by its natural boundaries, so completely isolated from
the rest of the world as to justify to some extent their intense reluctance to
open relations with the Red Devils of the West, as they call all Europeans,
whether fair or dark, though it was evidently the bright auburn hair and
rosy complexions of so many of the English visitors to China which
originated the name. The giving of this title is the only vengeance the poor
yellow skins have been able to take on those who invaded their capital,
pillaged their palaces and burnt their arsenals and vessels, not to speak of
the importation of the pernicious drug, opium, which is responsible for the
death of thousands every year.
THE
BOUNDARIES OF
 Independently of the Great Wall which once, though not CHINA

very successfully, defended China from the incursions of the Mongols and
Manchus, the Celestial Empire is bounded on the north by the great Gobi
desert and the grass steppes of Southern Mongolia; on the east by the sea
of China, the Eastern and the Yellow Seas; whilst on the west rise many a
lofty chain of mountains, their summits almost always crowned with snow.
These latter have not yet been all fully explored, though the name of many
a hero of discovery is connected with them, including that of Prince Henry
of Orleans, Margary and Marcel Monnier of quite recent fame.
In the vast circle enclosed within these boundaries of desert, mountain,
and sea, nearly every kind of vegetation can be successfully cultivated in
one district or another, whilst a considerable variety of types of the great
human family is met with, including members belonging to the same
groups as the people who have poured into Corea, Japan, Formosa, the
Philippine Islands, Indo-China, Siam, Kulja, and even a country so far away
as Persia.
As is well known, anthropologists are divided into two absolutely distinct
camps: the Polygenists, who claim that differences of species evidenced by
differences in height, in features, and in complexion, are the result of the
springing of the human race from different progenitors; and the
Monogenists, who believe in one primæval pair of parents only, and look
upon all differences between human creatures as caused by accidental
conditions modifying the primitive type. The latter assert that it was within
the boundaries mentioned above, on the central plateau of the present
Celestial Empire, that the first men appeared, and as they multiplied,
became diversified into yellow, black, white, and red, remaining in their
primitive home until, like a cup filled too full, they overflowed in every
direction to people other lands.
It is not for me to decide the vexed question of whether the MONGOLIANS
THE

polygenists or monogenists are in the right; those curious on

the subject may refer to the learned and deeply interesting works of
Quatrefages, Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Wallace and others, who have
brought their critical acumen to bear on the subject of the origin and
antiquity of man. I merely wish to emphasize here the fact that all agree in
believing China to have been occupied at an extremely remote date, and in
admitting that, however the changes may have come about, the human
family is now undoubtedly divided into five distinct groups: the brown, the
black, the red, the white, and the yellow. To the last belong the
Mongolians, with whom alone we have now to do, and which numbers,
whatever its peculiarities, more representatives than any other at the
present day.
The skin of this prolific race is always yellow, sometimes pale, and
sometimes of a brownish tinge. The stiff straight hair of the Mongol is as
black as ebony, and the skull is of the so-called bracycephalic type, that is
to say, short as compared to its breadth, whilst that of the Chinese and
Tartars is mesaticephalic, or of medium length and breadth.
The face is round, the eyes are mere narrow slits, often decidedly
oblique, the nose is large, the cheek-bones are very prominent, and the lips
are thick.
At first sight it would appear that the Mongolian dialects all spring from
one primitive speech, but examination of evidence proves that this is not
the case, for they really belong to two very ancient branches of human
speech: the monosyllabic language of the Indo-Chinese races, and the
polysyllabic of the other Mongolians. The Tibetans, Burmans, Siamese, and
Chinese dialects are all monosyllabic, whilst those in use by the Coreans,
Japanese, Tartars, Kirghizes, Kalmucks, Buriats, Samoyedes, and Finns are
polysyllabic.
All the inhabitants of the continent of Asia, with the exception of a few
tribes of the extreme north, certain groups of Malays and Dravidians in
India, with some of the dwellers in the Mediterranean districts of the south-
west, belong to the so-called Homo mongolicus, or Mongolian branch of the
great human family, whilst in Europe it claims the Finns and Lapps of the
north, the Osmanlis of Turkey, and the Magyars of Hungary. Homo articus,
or the Polar group, is considered by the best authorities to have originally
formed part of the Mongolian branch, including the Esquimaux, the
Greenlanders, the Kamtchatkans, etc., all of whom, however, as pointed out
by Haeckel, the great German naturalist, have in the course of centuries
become so modified by the conditions of life in the Arctic regions, that they
may now be looked upon as forming a separate species.
The inhabitants of the extreme north are short and squat, their skulls
are of the mesaticephalic, or even in some cases of the dolichocephalic
type, that is to say, they are long in proportion to their breadth; their eyes
are narrow and oblique, as are those of the Mongols; they have high cheek-
bones and large mouths. Their hair is coarse and black, and their skin of a
more or less clear brown colour, sometimes approaching to white, and
sometimes to yellow, as amongst the Mongols, whilst now and then it is
reddish, as is that of the native Americans. The dialects spoken by these
remote tribes differ as much from those of other Mongols as they do from
the American forms of speech, and the probability is that these inhabitants
of the Arctic regions are really a degenerate branch of the Mongol race,
whose progenitors passed over into the north of America from the north-
east of Asia.
In spite of the fact that emigrants did occasionally drift ISOLATION
CHINESE

across the formidable northern and western boundaries of the

vast Celestial Empire, the one leading idea for many centuries, alike of
rulers and ruled, was to keep their land sacred from intruders, and
discourage all intercourse with other nations, whom the Chinese were
trained from infancy to look upon as utter barbarians. There is no more
thrilling or more interesting story in literature than that of how this
cherished isolation was in the end broken in upon and the delusion finally
dispelled, that Europe was but a small, sparsely populated district, whose
inhabitants were eager to trade with the yellow men because of the poverty
of their own land.
The Russians and the Dutch, as well as the Portuguese, were eager in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to trade with China, and plant
permanent colonies within its boundaries, but self-interest alone prompted
their efforts, and they did nothing to open the eyes of the natives to the
true character of western civilization. The French, however, to their honour
be it spoken, were the pioneers of missionary effort, and as has been well
pointed out by Archibald Colquhoun in his China in Transformation, page
43, "the earlier knowledge of the West acquired by China, and that of China
acquired by the West, were mainly achieved by French missionaries; no
French Government ever sent a mission to Pekin to seek merely advantages
of trade," and it was not until 1869 that a different policy was inaugurated.
Far different was it with the English who obtained a footing in China, for
from the very first their one aim was to trade upon the ignorance of the
natives, and to make the largest possible fortunes. British trade with China
began later than that of the other great Western powers, but it rapidly
grew to far greater importance than that of Russia or Portugal, chiefly
because it was mainly carried on by that great and powerful commercial
body, the East India Company, on whom rests the responsibility of the first
introduction to the Celestial Empire of opium, now consumed in such
immense quantities and cultivated in China itself, but which was totally
unknown there before the eighteenth century. For over two centuries the
East India Company enjoyed a monopoly of trade, and in their eagerness
for gain its members swallowed many an affront to their own and their
country's dignity, for their relations to the Chinese Government resembled
those of humble suppliants to the "Son of Heaven."
There is something deeply pathetic in the gradual realization THECOMPANY
EAST INDIA

by that "Son of Heaven" that the sons of earth from over the
sea were really more powerful than himself, and that he was the one to be
defeated in any real conflict with them. How touching, for instance, was the
edict issued in 1800, the first year of the century, so fatal to China as a
nation, prohibiting the importation of opium, an edict utterly powerless to
check the evil, which was spreading like a fatal blight throughout the length
and breadth of the doomed land. The traffic went on unchecked, and
between 1821 and 1831 the amount landed at the various ports increased
from 4628 chests to 23,670. In 1832 the monopoly of the Company came
to an end, and the heads of the factories were succeeded by a
representative of the Sovereign of Great Britain, whom the Chinese
authorities hoped to coerce more easily than they could the many-headed
hydra the Company had seemed to be. "On the one side," says Professor
Legge, "was a resistless force determined to prosecute its enterprise for the
enlargement of its trade, and the conduct of it as with an equal nation; on
the other side, was the old Empire seeming to be unconscious of its
weakness, determined not to acknowledge the claim of equality, and
confident of its power to suppress the import of opium." For a brief space it
seemed as if the latter would gain the day, for England made the fatal
mistake of associating with her first representative, Lord Napier, two men
who had been in the hated East India Company. The policy pursued was
weak and vacillating; Lord Napier was disowned by his Government, and
after suffering much indignity at the hands of the Chinese, died at Macao of
a broken heart. He was succeeded by Sir J. F. Davis, during whose term of
office the relations between the two countries became more and more
strained, until in 1839 the Chinese Government made its last final effort to
oust out alike the foreigners and the abuses they had introduced, which
were to it as an ever-present canker eating into the life of the nation. The
able politician, Lin-Tseh-Hsu, was appointed Governor-General of the Kwang
provinces with orders to bring the foreign devils to reason.
 It so happened when the new ruler, who was "a thoroughly orthodox
Chinaman," arrived at Canton, there were British ships in port with some
twenty thousand chests of opium on board. Lin at once ordered these to be
given up for destruction, and as no notice was taken of his demand, he
commanded all the Chinese in the service of the foreigners to leave them at
once. They dared not disobey, and when they were gone a cordon of
troops was posted round the British quarters, and a manifesto was issued
to the effect that unless the opium was surrendered all the merchants
would be slain. Captain Eliot, who was Secretary to Sir J. F. Davis, seeing
no hope of rescue, gave up the opium, which was flung with quantities of
quick-lime, salt and water into deep trenches at Chunhow, near the mouth
of the river, "where it quickly became decomposed, and the mixture ran
into the sea."
This and other high-handed measures of the energetic Governor of
Kwang led to the war which resulted in the ceding of Hong-Kong to the
English and the opening to British trade of Canton, Amoy, Fuchan, Ningpo,
and Shanghai. The spell was in fact finally broken, Chinese isolation was at
an end for ever, and the first chapter was written of the history of modern
China. China is a land doomed to partition amongst the hated "foreign
devils," who are eager to divide the spoil, and are preparing to intersect the
once sacred interior of the flowery land with the relentless iron roads,
before the advance of which all privacy and seclusion disappear.
The Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, was succeeded after CONVENTION
THE PEKIN

another war, which began in 1856 and ended in 1858, by the

Treaty of Tien-tsin, making yet further concessions to England; but it was
not until after the Anglo-French Expedition had crossed the Pei-Ho river,
and encamped beneath the very walls of the capital itself, that the Chinese
realized how futile was further resistance. The Convention of Pekin, signed
in 1860, ratified the Treaty of Tien-tsin, and formed the foundation of the
present relations between China and Great Britain. The Emperor, Hsien-
Fung, died the next year, and his last hours must indeed have been
embittered by the knowledge that the flood-gates were opened, and that
he could only leave the semblance of power to his successor, an infant of
five years old. Nothing could now check the introduction of European
civilization, which in the eyes of the Chinese was synonymous with all that
was most detrimental to their true interests. Fortunately, however, the
advantages were not really so entirely on the side of the foreigners as is
generally supposed; for the people will in the end, it is hoped, lead better
and nobler lives than before. Missionaries of many nationalities are doing
their best against terrible odds to introduce the religion of the Redeemer,
and even in material matters some good has resulted to the much-
oppressed natives. Numerous steamers have long plied unmolested to and
fro between the chief European ports and Shanghai, and a system of
custom-house control has been established in that important town of
Central China, greatly to the advantage of native trade. The taxes imposed
on foreign goods are now one of the most important sources of the
revenues of the Empire, and the driving away of the "foreign devils" would
mean an incalculable loss to the Chinese themselves. The total value of the
exports from Shanghai alone is more than £22,715,000, of which some
£8,746,000 represents native produce from the immediate neighbourhood
of the port, whilst the imports, including Chinese goods from other districts,
reaches a considerably higher figure.
All this means prosperity to the millions, who before the HOPE FOR THE
FUTURE
throwing open of the inland provinces to foreign commerce,
lived from hand to mouth, and were ground down by the ceaseless
exactions of the native officials. This truth is not unfortunately even now
really understood by the populace, for political knowledge filters very slowly
from the palace to the hovels of China; but we may yet hope to see the day
when really cordial relations will be established between the white and
yellow races. The defeat of China by Japan, with the huge indemnity
exacted by the latter, was of course a terrible blow to commerce; but
already there are signs of recovery, for the wealth and numbers of the
people of the vast Empire are really alike inexhaustible.
 CHAPTER VI
French aspirations in Tonkin—Margary receives his instructions—Work already done on
the Yang-tse—Margary is insulted at Paï-Chou—He awaits instructions in vain at Lo-Shan
—The Tung-Ting lake—A Chinese caravanserai—The explorer leaves the river to proceed by
land—He meets a starving missionary—Kwei-Chou and the French bishop there—A terrible
road—Arrival at the capital of Yunnan—Armed escort from Bhâmo—Meeting between
Margary and Colonel Browne—Threatening attitude of natives—Margary crosses the
frontier alone—Colonel Browne's camp surrounded—Murder of Margary outside Manwyne
—Importance of Yunnan and Szechuan to Europeans.

Whether, as has been asserted by more than one French writer, it was
the French operations in Tonkin which so roused the jealousy of the British
as to determine them at all risks to render those operations futile in the
opening of a direct route from Yunnan to Burma, or whether they were
merely pursuing their usual astute policy of making exploration precede the
flag, there is no doubt that the tragic fate of the young explorer, Margary,
whose adventurous journey deserves relation here, was fruitful in most
important political results alike to England and to France. The French, who
looked upon Tonkin as their own special key to China, had meant to make
the Song-coi, or Red River, which is its chief artery, the outlet of the wealth
of Yunnan; the English succeeded in making the Yang-tse that outlet by the
concessions they wrung from the Chinese as part of the indemnity for the
murder of their explorer.
It was in 1874 that Augustus Raimond Margary, an INSTRUCTIONS
MARGARY'S

attaché of the British Embassy at Pekin, received instructions

from Sir Thomas Wade, then Minister Plenipotentiary to China, to go to
Bhâmo, and there meet Colonel Browne, who was about to start on an
expedition across Western China, with a view to open the overland route
between Burma and the Celestial Empire. Margary, who knew the natives
well, and had on many occasions given proof of his tact in dealing with
them, was to act as interpreter and guide to the English party.
Already the Yang-tse, the great river at the mouth of which Shanghai is
situated, had been opened to foreign trade as far as Hankow, that is to say,
for 600 miles, but the difficulties of communication with the interior were
still immense, so bad were the roads, and so ignorant the people of the
districts those roads traversed. What was really needed in the interests of
British trade was a continuous route partly by water and partly by land
from the port to Burma, and Margary was to test the practicability of such a
route, although the brutality of the natives to foreigners was well known,
and much of the district he had to traverse had never before been visited
by a European. Even now, as those who have read Marcel Monnier's
account of his adventures in Yunnan in the pages of the French journal Le
Temps know full well, there is anything but a cordial feeling for foreigners
in Yunnan, and a quarter of a century ago the traveller who ventured far
from Hankow must have carried his life in his hand.
Nothing daunted, however, by all he knew of the perils MARGARY DANGER
IN

before him, the gallant young explorer left Shanghai in a little

American steamer on August 24th, accompanied only by one English
servant and a Chinese secretary. Arrived at Hankow, which, now that it is to
be connected with Pekin, Russian Siberia, and Tonkin by rail, has a great
future before it as a commercial centre, the little party left the steamer and
hired boats from a native banker for the further voyage. They started again
on September 4th, and on the 6th cast anchor off Paï-Chou, a
picturesque town rising from amongst magnificent trees. This town turned
out to be extremely well built, and prosperous, and to be surrounded by
well-cultivated plantations, yielding quantities of valuable produce. Margary
and his secretary wandered about for some time, noting everything, and at
first the natives were very civil; but when the visitors approached the quay,
to which the junks of the inhabitants were moored, the crowd became
insulting, and followed the travellers to their vessel, hooting them and
dancing round them with menacing gestures. They escaped without injury,
however, and pushed on to Lu-Chi-Ku, where they saw a big war-junk, with
no less than twenty-one guns. On September 11th they reached Lo-Shan,
where a halt was made to await a reply to a telegram sent by Margary to
Sir Thomas Wade. No answer came, however, and a whole week was
wasted, during which Margary nearly lost his life in a fracas with the
natives. The heat was intense, and but for the shade of the fine mulberry
trees on the banks of the river, would have been almost insupportable. In
spite of it the Englishman spent most of his time shooting the plentiful
game, consisting chiefly of partridges and pheasants. One day he had left
his gun behind him, to go and call on a mandarin, who held an official post
at Lo-Shan. As he was being carried in a sedan-chair by native porters, he
suddenly met a gang of conscripts bound for Formosa, who surrounded
him, shouting, "Ha! Ha! here is a foreign devil—let us do for the foreign
devil!" How the "foreign devil" wished he had had his stout club in his
hand, he would quickly have dispersed the cowardly mob; but seeing he
was absolutely defenceless, the soldiers seized the ends of the bamboo
rods supporting the chair, and began shaking its occupant about in a most
unpleasant manner. With a quiet smile on his lips, but hatred in his heart,
Margary was meditating a blow with his clenched fist in the face of the
ringleader, when his servant relieved the tension of the situation by striking
one of the assailants in the chest with all his force. The result was magical
and immediate, the brave soldiers all ran away, and the "foreign devil"
arrived safely at the house of the mandarin. Fortunately that official proved
friendly, and gave his visitor the escort of two lictors for his return on
board. Back again in his own boat, the explorer harangued the crowd,
which still lingered on the bank, in these words: "Why did you treat me so
roughly? Is this your politeness to strangers? I had heard that the Chinese
were distinguished amongst other nations for their courtesy. Is this how
you show it? Shall I go and tell my fellow-countrymen how you treat me?"
This speech, in their own language, greatly astonished the audience, who
received it in silence, and quietly withdrew, apparently quite ashamed of
themselves, the older amongst them trying to lay the blame on the
younger.

FIG. 33.—CHINESE PEASANT CRUSHING RICE.

On September 20th Margary gave up all hope of hearing THE TUNG-TING

LAKE
from Sir Thomas Wade, and resumed his voyage, feeling rather
out of heart, no doubt, at the silence of his chief Helped by a strong wind
from the north-east, he succeeded the same day in leaving the muddy
Yang-tse, and entering the beautiful Tung-Ting lake, of a lovely blue colour,
from which the Great River draws its chief volume. At the entrance to this
lovely sheet of water is the island of Chün-Shan, celebrated throughout
the Celestial Empire for its tea, considered the best in China, a portion of
which is set apart for the use of the Son of Heaven, or the Emperor, and for
the chief dignitaries of the province in which it is grown. The lake, lovely as
it is in appearance, is of little depth, and except for the clouds of venomous
insects which hover over it, inflicting torture on those who venture to
navigate it, there is but little life about it. A few towns of no particular
importance rise from its banks, but Margary did not land at any of them.
The natives of the shores of the lake say that the flies which haunt the
surface of the water are the winged guardians, appointed by the Spirit of
the Lake, to keep away intruders.
On the 22nd the explorer entered the river Yuen, a stream of
transparent waters, and halted for a brief time opposite the town of Nih-
sin-Tang, where, to his relief, the winged and barbed sentinels of the lake
melted away as rapidly as they had appeared.

FIG. 34.—A CHINESE FERRYMAN.

The banks of the Yuen are extremely picturesque: instead of the sewers
and rugged paths which generally disfigure the banks of the water-courses
of China, the riverine districts consist of well-cultivated land, cotton
plantations alternating with beautiful meadows bordered by venerable
willows. The farms, too, are clean and well kept; men, women and children
seem to lead happy, prosperous lives, and Margary was everywhere kindly
received. At sunrise, on the 28th, the expedition arrived opposite Tao-Yuen-
Hsien, a large, prosperous, but unwalled town. This was the first important
place without fortifications which Margary had visited. The inhabitants
seemed very independent, and their chief industry was the making of
pottery; every house, of whatever size, was decorated inside and out with
tasty vases, serving as pots for the dwarf orange trees and other stunted
plants in which the Chinese take so great a delight.
Beyond Tao-Yuen-Hsien the river narrows, and flows between rocky
gorges, beyond which low conical hills, covered with sombre pines, rise one
above the other, none of them more than about 200 feet high, the effect of
which is, nevertheless, extremely fine. From the description given of the
scenery by Margary, it must greatly resemble that of Civet in the Ardennes,
immortalized by George Sand in her poetical romance, Malgré tout.
The province of Hunan, so rich in geological interest, and in AN OLD FRIEND
which such terrible convulsions must have taken place in the remote past,
was now entered, and the important town of Yuping-Hsien was soon
reached, where the drooping spirits of Margary were cheered by finding the
chief magistrate to be an old friend of his, who had formerly been
interpreter in the English legation at Pekin. The native official received his
former colleague with a salute from three guns, and, better still, wished
him to spend a few days with him at his own residence. Margary gladly
accepted the hospitality offered, donned his dress-uniform, and was carried
in state to the Yamin or house of the magistrate, where a great crowd was
assembled to witness the arrival of the foreigner.
Refreshed by his rest, the English explorer soon started again, and on
October 27th reached the important town of Chen-Yuan-Fu, at the entrance
to which is a very fine bridge of six arches, which would be considered a
work of art even in Europe. Round about the city rise rocky heights, which
give it a very picturesque appearance. Margary landed near the bridge, for
he would now have to travel by land, and accompanied by his own servant
and four men who had been told off to protect him, he made his way to a
house where he hoped to be able to spend the night. It was not exactly a
hotel, but a stopping-place where travellers could hire sedan-chairs,
coolies, and horses; in fact, all that was needed for the further prosecution
of his journey. As there are generally several such establishments in every
important place, the Chinese proprietors always send agents down to the
landing-stages to secure the custom of travellers just as do their brethren
in Europe.
Now the messenger who had got Margary to promise to MULTITUDE A RAGING

patronize his master's house, had disappeared as soon as he

had transacted the business in hand, leaving the English traveller and his
men in the lurch. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the little party
made their way to the caravanserai chosen, through the crowds assembled
to stare at them. Arrived there, they found a clean, comfortable-looking
shelter, but no one to receive them. The next thing to do was to get the
baggage of the expedition under shelter, but to this the crowd outside
objected so very vigorously that Margary was obliged to give up the
attempt. He determined, however, to seek the aid and protection of the
Hsien, or first magistrate of the town, and to force his way to him in spite
of all opposition. He had the door of the caravanserai opened, and faced
the raging multitude outside with head erect and an air of such determined
resolution, that the easily daunted Chinese recoiled before him, and
withdrawing as he advanced, allowed him to reach the Yamin unhurt. There
he found the chief magistrate, who must have heard all the noise, for the
caravanserai was only some two hundred paces off, quietly awaiting events
without moving a finger to control them.

FIG. 35.—A MANDARIN'S HOUSE.

 Margary could not persuade the official to let him remain for a night's
rest in the town, but he did succeed in securing four sturdy coolies as
porters, by whom he was carried from. Chen-Yuan, where he had been so
grossly insulted, to Kwei-Yang, capital of the province of Kwei-Chou,
receiving a kind welcome everywhere en route.
Three days before his arrival at Yunnan, capital of the province of the
same name, as the English explorer was taking his lunch al fresco, he was,
to his great surprise and delight, accosted by a Frenchman, an unfortunate
missionary, who was bound for the same place, and was nearly wild with
joy at finding another European in this remote district. An eager
conversation began in Chinese, but as Margary could speak French, the
native language was soon exchanged for it. Margary tells how the two sat
down to the same "table," and were to share their meal, but the missionary
was so badly off for provisions that, in the end, the Englishman gave him
half his beefsteak, with all the bread he had. Then he had an omelette
made for his guest, and gave him a glass of spirits. From the eagerness
with which the food was consumed it was evident that the poor fellow had
been almost starving. The meal over, Margary told his new friend of the
way in which he had been insulted at Chen-Yuan, and the Frenchman
replied that most likely the magistrate had taken the explorer for a Jesuit
father, or a Lazarist, that is to say, a follower of Saint Vincent de Paul.
However it may be in the future, the people of Central China had in
Margary's time no toleration for Roman Catholic missionaries, and there
was little chance of their doing anything to promote civilization amongst the
natives. Had the magistrate looked at the Englishman's passport when the
latter first landed he would have been very differently treated. It will be
traders, not preachers of the gospel, who will be the first to introduce
European ideas. Even manufacturers and engineers who elsewhere often
achieve so much success have little chance in China, for the people are as
content with their own systems of mechanical production and their clumsy
primitive modes of working their salt and mineral mines as they are with
their religion.
At Hwei-Chow, a picturesque walled city of great ABISHOP FRENCH

importance, Margary met an old French bishop and two of his

priests who had adopted the costume of the Chinese, and spoke their
language even better than their own. The bishop, in fact, had been so long
expatriated that he had forgotten his own tongue, and spoke that of his
adopted country with his visitor. In fact, instead of converting the natives
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