Being More Rather than Having More: Educational Paradigms for Belonging,Esteem,and Self-Actualization

Abstract

This article explores the possibility of cultivating self-actualization, defined as living a personally fulfilling life, through means of education. A flaw common in many contemporary systems of education is the emphasis on having more as opposed to being more, which can perpetuate paradigms of competition, conformity, and external markets of success such as grades, rankings, and material achievement. Drawing on Abraham Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” I propose a theoretical framework that centers student's feelings of belonging and esteem as vital to the foundation for self-actualization and meaningful learning. I propose alternate educational philosophies that support this framework by centering recognition, trust, and freedom as essential conditions for belonging and esteem. Using A.S. Neill's Summerhill School as a case study, I argue that granting students autonomy and acceptance within an educational setting fosters the conditions essential for the individual's ability to self-actualize and their overall well-being. When educators value students beyond intellectual productivity, recognizing their individuality, agency, and relationality within a classroom, education becomes a process in which students can become more fully themselves.

Introduction

American philosopher and psychologist William James stated, “if any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick” (1950). Yet, today, many individuals struggle to determine their potential, as many dominant education systems frame success on “an excessively narrow measure of cognitive ability” (OECD, 2025). Such narrow measures have been linked to a widening concern with student well-being, suggesting that the current global mental health crisis signals many students are lacking a real sense of “what their lives are for” (OECD, 2025). These trends suggest that many educational models limit a student's ability to find purpose throughout their schooling. When education prioritizes external achievement over internal development, it stifles students’ capacity to create meaning, agency, and self-understanding, neglecting the conditions necessary for self-actualization. These concerns reflect a current shift in educational discourse on the importance of human flourishing, or living a meaningful and fully realized life. Philosopher Maxine Greene succinctly summarizes this notion, stating that individuals within modern education systems are taught to focus on “having more” rather than “being more” (1988, p. 7).

In response to the concern of students lacking a greater purpose during their academic years, this paper advances a theoretical framework that centers students’ feelings of belonging and esteem as central to an educational model. Belonging and esteem needs are vital to a child's ability to cultivate agency and purpose within their learning, ultimately enabling self-actualization. This framework challenges deficit-oriented paradigms that frame students in terms of lack or pathology, and instead emphasizes a growth-oriented approach that centers recognition, trust, and freedom as essential conditions for belonging and esteem. To illustrate this framework in action, this paper analyzes A.S. Neill's Summerhill School as a case study, exploring how its educational philosophy and mission cultivates belonging, autonomy, and self-worth. This paper ultimately argues for the reorientation of educational aims, grounding the potential for self-actualization — living a personally fulfilling life — at the forefront of how to define true educational success.

Defining Self-Actualization

The current discussion on education for flourishing relies on historical, philosophical, and psychological definitions of the term – each of which primarily focus on how to fulfill human potential. In 1970, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote that “what humans can be, they must be, they must be true to their own nature” (Motivation and Personality, 1970, p. 22). Maslow coined his concept of self-actualization to encapsulate this idea of human potentialities, explaining that self-actualization occurs when one has “become everything that one is capable of becoming” (p. 46). This concept relies on an individual's ability to align their outward behaviors and pursuits with internal desires and passions.

Self-actualization aptly sits at the top of Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs” pyramid. The four lower-order needs that make up the base tiers of his pyramid include Physiological Needs, Safety, Belonging, and Esteem. Importantly, Maslow explains that when any of these needs are not adequately satiated, an individual's behavior will be fully motivated by their desire to fulfill this need, termed by Maslow as a “deficiency need.” Once the individual transcends deficiency-motivated behaviors, they can focus on growth-motivated pursuits, or “being needs.” This shift from deficiency to growth-oriented behavior allows individuals to focus on what they can become rather than what they lack and places self-actualization within reach.

This framework will work with the ideas of belonging, esteem, and recognition as the primary needs that education systems must be able to meet for their students so that they can become self-actualizing. Recognition is connected to Maslow's needs of belonging and esteem, because recognition within an educational context directly relates to the satisfaction of both hierarchical needs.

Borrowing from Charles Taylor, recognition is a “vital human need” that is shaped through interaction with others rather than in isolation (1994, p. 26). Further, Taylor explains, true recognition must be derived from a “regime of reciprocal recognition among equals,” rather than a hierarchical ladder (1994, p. 50). This specific understanding of recognition as a mutual, equilateral good directly relates the term to how Maslow understood esteem. Esteem needs, Maslow argued, relate to feelings of recognition derived from doing something one intrinsically believes are good and worthy of praise. He wrote that we must be able to distinguish the accomplishments that are derived from “deserved respect from others” from those which come merely from “external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation” (1970, p. 46). Using Karen Horney's words, this distinction helps tease apart the esteem that comes from one's “Real Self” rather than out of the “idealized pseudo-self” (p. 46).

By recognizing a student for their worth and agency within the educational context, educators and peers can help students feel as though they truly belong in the educational contexts they enter each day. This sense of belonging encapsulates feelings of inclusion, acceptance, and is a mutual force of a feeling ‘at home’ between the self and others they confront. Importantly, belonging is not solely an individual feeling, but a socio-relational and political process shaped by boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (Yuval-Davis et al., 2006). It has been rooted in an individual's affect, attachment, and feelings of being that you are “where you should be and that you are recognised and accepted as being connected with, and rightly part of, a specific environment” (Almarode et al., 2024).

An educational model that cultivates an environment where students feel recognition, belonging, and esteem permits the child to move beyond deficit-motivated behaviors and work through their being needs such as purpose, self-understanding, and flourishing. In creating an educational context where students can strive for self-actualization, students can dissolve a perceived tension between self and society, as all aspects of their personhood would be encouraged as collaborative and synergistic.

Self-Actualization's Constraints — Defining the Deficit

These feelings of recognition, esteem and belonging are not to be taken for granted, as current education systems that have a narrowly formed sense of worth based on cognitive ability often leave students feeling “othered” by the system. Maslow wrote that “social institutions, and indeed culture itself, are customarily studied as shapers, forcers, inhibitors, rather than as need gratifiers, happiness producers, self-actualization fosterers,” and in most dominant educational contexts, these institutions shape and force a narrative of what individuals are meant to be from a young age (1970, p. 292). This forced narrative and narrow understanding of developmental success limits students’ ability to grow into themselves, as Charles Taylor explains, “a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (1994, p. 25).

One modern example of such nonrecognition is highlighted in Psychologist Patricia E. Finnegan's article titled “The Medical Model vs Autism as Biodiversity,” where she presents the “pathology paradigm” to explain how neural differences in individuals are described in terms of deficiency. The DSM-5, for instance, defines disorders such as ADHD and ASD by contrasting their traits from what psychologists see to be a ‘normal’ mode of functioning. These narratives of deficiency are common in the psychiatric field and often reflect an overarching goal of eliminating ‘abnormal’ behaviors (2023). The goal of treatment is for the individual to reach “normal functioning,” which is measured by productivity levels rather than well-being (2023). This causes the individual to see themselves in a constant deficit, seeking to change their perceived deficiencies rather than seeking growth-motivated pursuits.

Individuals who fall outside of elite socio-economic classes are also pulled into such deficiency characterization. In their article Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron describe the leading force of cultural norms as the “cultural arbitrary” (Broadfoot, 1978). They argue that when an elite class enforces their own norms and values, specific achievements have a social premium. These values make up the “cultural arbitrary,” and in the world of education, are imposed on students by individuals who control traditional pedagogy. Teachers, Bourdieu argues, reproduce these dominant norms, pressuring students to conform to these ‘normal,’ elitist behaviors at the expense of their own individuality and personal histories (Broadfoot, 1978, p. 78). This ostracizes students who do not submit to cultural norms and stifles a student's ability to be creative, authentic, original, and generative. Such characterization results in the “fossilization of creativity,” as individuals who do not match external standards become paralyzed from engaging authentically in their classroom, acting only in ways that are perceived to make up for their deficits (p. 79).

From Deficit to Growth

Deficit-oriented educational paradigms treat the student as a means to an end of output, aiming to reshape the student to fit into a narrowly defined notion of cognitive functioning. This system reflects a neglect of what the German concept Bildung describes as the cultivation of the self: moral understanding, self-understanding, and purpose on top of subject-matter acquisition. When an education system ignores the need for this added dimension, students are recognized primarily through their deficiencies and performance rather than their inherent capacities.

This conditional recognition undermines psychological safety, weakening a student's sense of belonging as their acceptance becomes tied to external validation rather than authenticity. Without a secure foundation of recognition and belonging, the development of stable self-esteem is compromised, leading students to rely on external validation rather than personal agency. In such conditions, students adopt compliance-based behaviors oriented toward approval rather than intrinsic engagement with their environment necessary for self-actualization.

By contrast, recognizing students for their unique capabilities fosters environments of belonging and emotional security. As reported by UNESCO, when students feel “cared for, supported and emotionally connected,” their intellectual and academic development is also strengthened (Flook et al., 2022, p. 266). Within such contexts, students are better able to exercise their agency, pursue growth-motivated learning, and develop the whole self. In this way, educational environments that center recognition and belonging can shift students away from externally driven identities and rather promote the process of becoming, cultivating the conditions necessary for self-actualization and human flourishing.

Visions of Growth-Motivating Education

The child must be afforded the opportunity to lead a life that aligns with their own intrinsic interests and capacities, “being an active, self-disciplined, deciding agent rather than a pawn, or helplessly ‘determined by others,’” (Maslow, 1970, p. 161). Educational philosophers Maxine Greene and bell hooks have touched on this subject, arguing for the importance of a students’ feeling of inclusion and belonging by promoting agency and autonomy within a classroom.

In The Dialectic of Freedom (1988), philosopher Maxine Greene critiques education systems that leave students “subsumed under other people's definitions,” seeking external validation by maintaining social norms, expectations, and gains, no matter how artificial these needs really are (p. 98). Greene argues that to overcome such habituation, there must be a “surpassing of a constraining or deficient ‘reality,’ actually perceived as deficient by a person,” so that the individual can move toward “what is possible or realizable to them” (1988, p. 5). Her work calls for collective awareness, urging individuals to name the obstacles that constrain them. Her writing on freedom points to the ways in which people can, quoting Hannah Arendt, appear before one another as “‘the best they know how to be’” (1988, p. xi). This means full acceptance of an individual's idiosyncrasies, supporting their fulfillment of belonging and esteem. Specifically, she describes the freedom individuals feel when they are able to choose what they will set out to accomplish from an intrinsic place, making “decisions they believe to be fully their own” (p. 101). Education, to Greene, should therefore enable students to attend to real experiences and strive toward their ongoing “completion,” a process of continual self-actualization that replaces the pursuit of having more with the goal of being more (p. 8).

Similarly, in Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks critiques United States education systems for replicating white, upper-class values that, like Bourdieu's ‘cultural arbitrary,’ diminish the agency and individuality of students who might fall outside typical notions of success. Within such a hierarchy, students from marginalized backgrounds are taught to “assimilate into the mainstream, change speech patterns, points of reference, drop any habit that might reveal them to be from a non-materially privileged background” to avoid feelings of estrangement (1994, p. 181). To counter this, hooks calls for an education that allows students to “know themselves better and live more fully” (1994, p. 194). By centering experience, students develop their feelings of belonging and esteem through authentic participation. hooks emphasizes the empowerment that educators and students alike feel when they “recognize [their] own agency, [their] capacity to be active participants in the pedagogical process” (p. 183). She explains that “focusing on experience allows students to claim a knowledge base from which they can speak,” and in turn, provides them the ability to recognize their own power to use their innate capacities to shape the lives they truly hope to lead (p. 148).

Together, these perspectives position education as a space for agency, belonging, and self-directed growth. This positioning allows students to derive a more holistic learning experience from their education, learning how to be more rather than simply aiming to have more knowledge or external gains.

A Path Toward Self-Actualization

Collectively, these philosophers envision education as a space that not only meets all of a child's lower-tier needs, but also affords the child continued growth through a self-actualizing process. Psychologist A.S. Neill's Summerhill School demonstrates this framework in action bycultivating an environment where freedom and belonging enable students to become more fully themselves. Founded in 1921, Summerhill aims to make the school fit the child instead of the child fitting the school, welcoming the originality and free choice of all students. Summerhill conducts weekly meetings where the vote of the student holds as much worth as the vote of the staff, even as young as the age of six, to ensure the fortification of a community. This structure allows students to speak freely without obfuscating their voice under authority and permits personal interest in what actions and behaviors ought to look like within a cohesive and democratic environment (see Neill, 1971). As Charles Taylor put it, “we need relationships to fulfill, but not to define, ourselves” (1994, p. 33).

Summerhill fits into the proposed theoretical model as it fulfills lower-tier needs essential for self-actualization, moving students beyond the deficit and into whole-person development. Summerhill meets love and belonging needs through its tight knit community where students report feeling “unconditionally loved” and enter society understanding themselves and how to “live with other people” (Chadwick, 2019, p. 1:21:40). Further, Summerhill meets esteem needs by ensuring children feel self-secure, earning deserved respect and esteem from others out of their own personal actions. There aren’t rules on climbing trees at Summerhill, because as the current headmaster Zoe Neill notes, “if you learn to climb a tree, you learn to hold tight, and you learn to climb it within your own capacity” (Chadwick, 2019, p. 31:30).

Sufficiently meeting these needs and allowing students to take charge of their education, Summerhill demonstrates that its students are becoming self-actualizing individuals. While such an educational experience may not be easily transferable to a Western public-school context — as such a freedom promoting school requires full-year living quarters and a smaller community than what many public schools can afford — the case of Summerhill still provides valuable, transferable methods of educating youth for self-actualization. Qualities such as democratic voting, seeing educators and students as equal peers, and the promotion of freedom of choice are all conditions that could be adopted by mainstream education systems. Furthermore, while Summerhill might lack a push for academic success that has become expected in many Western educational contexts, Summerhill school's focus on intrinsic genesis and capacity fulfillment leads an individual to be better prepared for the world’s unexpected challenges than those who develop in a context requiring them to ‘adjust’ to a societal expectation of ‘normal.’ Rather than pushing students to match a standard by merely compensating for supposed deficiencies, Summerhill celebrates each induvidual’s uniqueness and encourages them to transcend deficiency-motivated behaviors. By nurturing intrinsic interests and affirming worth beyond performance, Summerhill enables children to grow into well-rounded individuals aligned with their inner purpose.

Conclusion

Self-actualization is a state in which one lives for the pursuit of growth, engaging in tasks for their own sake and meeting life's challenges with resilience. For a child to develop this capacity, needs of recognition, belonging, and esteem must be adequately fulfilled. Modern society, driven by consumerism and competition, perpetuates the illusion that success comes from having more rather than being more, yet true fulfillment cannot emerge from conformity to extrinsic standards. Such conformity only produces unstable satisfaction, leaving individuals more susceptible to crashing out from setbacks and minor inconveniences. When the individual resists conformity and retains autonomy over their desires and behaviors, they become “more realistic, less destructive of self and others, more comprehensive, more integrated and holistic” and more accepting of life's challenges (Maslow, 1970, p. 38).

When surveying hundreds of parents about what they believe is the paramount goal of their child's development, psychologists found that the vast majority of parents reported well-being to be what they desire most for their children (Seligman et al., 2009). If we value children's happiness and fulfillment, education must be a space where kids can grow to be secure in their own identities, rather than driven by artificial measures of success. The future of education and the future of society lies not in cultivating cogs for a machine, but rather in awakening the unique strengths and inner capacities that already reside within each individual. By following an educational framework that fosters individuality, agency, and authenticity, educators move closer to a system that cultivates lives defined by being more rather than having more.