Emphasis on success is driving children to despair

Are we destroying education by placing to much emphasis on success? Justin Thomas investigates

Should schools be about passing exams or instilling a love of learning in students? Pawan Singh / The National

Last week, the director general of the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, Dr Abdulla Al Karam, urged schools and educators to place greater emphasis on student happiness and well-being. Dr Al Karam eloquently hit the nail on the head saying: “Happiness leads you to success, not the other way around.” He contradicted the widely held notion that if we push students hard enough, they might succeed academically and find happiness.

Dr Al Karam is far from alone in challenging this flawed notion. Speaking at the World Innovation Summit for Health, held this year in Doha, former UK health minister, Lord Darzi, argued that many schools are operating as “exam factories”, with little or no concern for the psychological well-being of pupils. I call this situation “sick school syndrome”. In their worst incarnation, sick schools actually heighten the psychological distress of students and then fail in their duty of care to provide an appropriate number of adequately qualified emotional counsellors (career counsellors don’t count).

Within our current “exam factory” model, ever-greater pressure is being placed on our children to excel, make-the-grade and gain acceptance to the best universities and graduate programmes. Academic success has always been highly valued, but our current obsessive overemphasis on academic achievement has driven many students to despair. All children are hardwired to love learning, but after a few years in an exam factory they come to loathe it – this is the true tragedy. We talk about lifelong learning, while simultaneously extinguishing the innate passion in our young people to pursue knowledge.

The pressure of the exam factory is evident in other ways too. Academic dishonesty has, in some countries, become rampant. Studies of US college students report rates of cheating, such as plagiarism, to be as high as 90 per cent. Many of the cheats are no doubt good-kids-gone-bad, individuals who felt compelled to cheat so as not to get left behind. Similarly, the use of so-called “smart drugs” is clearly on the rise. Childline, a UK charity providing a telephone helpline for stressed youngsters, reported that calls related to exam and workload stress more than tripled in 2014.

For all of our setting higher standards, introducing new targets and adding more exams, we don’t really seem to be seeing much improvement. If anything, the overzealous push of the exam factory is serving only to make our children ill. A recent survey by the UK’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers found that three-quarters of the educators surveyed thought that the stress faced by students resulted in low self-esteem, while more than 60 per cent felt it contributed to problematic levels of anxiety, a lack of motivation and an inability to concentrate. Perhaps more worrying still, around 62 per cent thought that today’s students were under more pressure than they were just two years ago.

For Dr Al Karam and many others, the solution is that we must develop a culture of well-being and happiness within our schools. Cultivate joy and a joy of learning, and academic success becomes a natural by-product rather than an all-consuming goal.

Neuroscience and allied psychological interventions have made huge advances in understanding human emotion in the past few decades. There are now numerous techniques that have proven highly effective in terms of improving happiness and well-being. We also know that a key component of long-term happiness (frequently experiencing, and appreciating, positive emotional states) is the acceptance, if not the appreciation, of sadness (negative emotional states) too.

Teachable techniques exist that can simultaneously promote well-being and prevent psychological disorder. The question isn’t: “Can we teach happiness?” Rather, the question should be: “Why aren’t we?”

Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas