Education,time-poverty and well-being

Abstract

This article focuses on ‘objective list’ accounts of personal well-being and the related view that schools should aim at inducting students into a wide range of objective goods. It reviews various objective lists and notes that very many of them include knowledge, a love of beauty and close personal relationships. It then seeks to explain why this might be so and cautions against narrowness in specifying intrinsic goods, before exploring the role of extensive personal time in engaging in them. This article links all this to the current UK government’s advocacy of knowledge and other cultural goods in English school aims, seeing this as an instance of a more global tendency. It argues that this approach both assumes a too restricted notion of intrinsic goods and – especially – is unrealistic in the light of widespread time-poverty. It suggests, finally, that if more personal time is to be sought, school reform must go hand in hand with wider social changes.