Eudaimonic Wellbeing and Education

Nowadays, the concept of well-being and its synonyms – quality of life, happiness, health, flourishing, thriving,
fulfilling and many others that are listed in the last chapter of this book – can be easily found in popular
magazines as well as scientific journals. The increment of this area over the last two decades has led to the
creation of what has been called the science of happiness (Kahneman et al. 1999; Diener 2000; Seppala 2016).
Modern studies on well-being and happiness cover a wide spectrum of scientific investigation, from
the biological level (Berridge and Kringelbach 2011; Lewis et al. 2014), to the personal level (psychology, Seligman 2013), to the macro level (policy studies and big data, (OECD 2015). The neuroscientific aspect
focuses mainly on the pleasure and reward neuronal circuits and how to reinforce, limit or suppress them
(Kringelbach and Berridge 2010; Berridge and Kringelbach 2015). The psychological level mostly focuses
on the subjective well-being (SWB), its inherited and/or malleable aspects, and its concrete applications
(Diener 1984; Diener and Suh 2000). The policy level makes use of big data sets to discover how different
factors such as schooling, health or income interact in shaping collective well-being (Costanza et al. 2014).
Each of these areas are already vast and well-structured. Educational reflection on happiness and well-
being in modern society and science has also been brought forward (White 2007; Suissa 2008) but it does
not seem to have reached the same magnitude and critical mass of other disciplines. In order to contribute
to the debate within educational science and to suggest a possible approach, this paper relies on the distinction
between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being as proposed in the seminal work by Ryan and Decy
(2001) and presents the strong historical connection of the latter with education.