Flourishing is all the rage these days. In May, Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program released the first wave of data from its Global Flourishing Study. In November, the OECD released its framework on education for human flourishing. Around the same time, LearnerStudio published “Learning to Flourish in the Age of AI”. And we launched a new nonprofit, the Center for Teen Flourishing.

The optimists in us love the term. Who doesn’t want flourishing kids? But our inner skeptics always worry when there’s sudden mass convergence around an idea. Which leads us to wonder: What exactly do we mean by flourishing?

And what can “flourishing advocates” learn from previous movements to help young people thrive, whether through 21st century skills or social and emotional learning broadly, or from the pursuits of grit, self-esteem, and happiness specifically? Longtime Education Next readers will recall a host of challenges over the years in all these domains.

What Is Flourishing?

According to Tyler VanderWeele’s team at Harvard, flourishing consists of six domains that can be measured through self-report surveys tracking individuals longitudinally. They are: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

The OECD describes flourishing as “Five central student competencies: adaptive problem-solving, ethical competence, understanding the world, appreciating the world and acting in the world.”

LearnerStudio argues “Human Flourishing in the Age of AI” is a worldview positioned between “Nostalgic Humanism” (resisting technology, returning to simpler times) and “Technocentrism” (efficiency above all, radical individualism). Its framework calls for centering distinctively human competencies—skills that are difficult to automate—while leveraging AI as a tool. They propose a “Humanics” curriculum emphasizing AI literacy alongside modernized disciplinary knowledge and human literacies: human skills (adaptability, collaboration, critical thinking) and human knowledge (history, philosophy, anthropology—domains studying the human experience). The goal is to shape young people who are “inspired and prepared for lives of purpose, human connection, hope, shared prosperity, and robust civic thriving.”

We see strengths in each:

We like the Harvard effort for its careful attention to measurement.

We like LearnerStudio’s blend of tech resistance with appropriate tech use, especially their naming the trap of nostalgic humanism.

We’re particularly interested in the “Acting in the World” component of the OECD framework: “It is a concept that includes but goes beyond the contribution one makes through paid work. At its heart is the invitation to develop purpose and intent, through chosen activities. For young people, these activities may lie in art, design and making; music, dance and acting; sport; or volunteering and service.”

Our Center for Teen Flourishing, launched in November 2025, defines teen flourishing based on precisely those activities—that is, what happens from 3:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. We measure how many hours per week a teen engages in non-screen activities that research shows are good for teens: in-person time with friends, exercise, participation in arts, sports, or clubs, pleasure reading, outdoor time, volunteering, or part-time jobs.

Why that time period? Because once you include 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the definition of flourishing, you tilt the discussion substantially towards what the school experience should be. You end up locked in the century-old “Tinkering Towards Utopia” stalemate that Stanford historian Larry Cuban chronicled.

The 3:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. period needs its own deep examination. Languishing teens today often were, during their childhood and preteen years, doing things after school—sports, play, arts. But over time, they “voted with their feet” and became teens who mostly reject those offerings. They’re on their couch or bed, scrolling. We need field studies to better understand the 3:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. window; we need fresh, measurable interventions that provide on-ramps back to “acting in the world.”

What can “flourishing” learn from other movements?

Self-esteem: Good goal, wrong strategy. David Yeager, a psychologist at UT Austin and author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, warns that we have a long track record of getting ahead of ourselves with ideas we love but lack programs to deliver. In the 1980s, studies showed that young people reporting low self-esteem had far worse outcomes years later. “Schools were right to worry about self-esteem,” Yeager told me. “But they didn’t know what to do to build self-esteem, so they did some pretty dumb stuff.” (Jenny was part of this fad—her mother gave her a self-esteem bear that told her she was awesome when she squeezed it.)

Grit: “Teaching” a trait may not change behavior. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth’s work identified grit as crucial for success. Paul Tough’s 2012 book How Children Succeed popularized the concept brilliantly. But when Tough set out to write the obvious sequel about how to build grit, he discovered a problem. “There’s no evidence that any particular curriculum or textbook or app can effectively teach kids grit or self-control or curiosity,” he told Jenny in 2022.

Meanwhile, high-performing charter schools like KIPP appeared to build grit through intensive relationship-building—teachers working extraordinary hours to connect with students, then spending down that relationship capital to get kids to persist through challenges. That’s different from teaching character skills in a classroom. Relationship-building is not a curriculum you can package and scale. The grit movement discovered that naming a trait and explaining its importance doesn’t create a pedagogical pathway. The grit-focused “Character Lab” quietly closed its doors in 2024 (its reasons are stated here).

Social and emotional learning: The means-versus-ends measurement problem. Social and emotional learning, or SEL, demonstrates another temptation: choosing academic achievement as the outcome variable that we “really” care about. Advocates tried to tie SEL success to math and English test scores, because that’s where accountability pressures live. But doing so muddies the goal. You’re no longer focused on trying to improve a kid’s social and emotional regulation for its own sake. Instead, to justify the effort, you’re trying to measure success through something tangentially related: improving test scores. Getting along with people and managing your emotions is a worthy end unto itself—and that’s hard enough to achieve.

Happiness courses: The evidence evaporates. College happiness courses seemed like a breakthrough. Laurie Santos’s positive psychology course at Yale became the university’s most popular class in its 300-year history; Coursera’s version enrolled 3 million students. A foundational 2009 meta-analysis by Nancy Sin and Sonja Lyubomirsky found that positive psychology interventions of the kind featured in the course improved wellbeing with effect sizes around r = .29—nice, chunky effects. The paper has been cited nearly 5,000 times.

But then the replication police arrived. A 2019 reanalysis in PLOS One found significant publication bias; after accounting for studies with null findings that never got published, many of the apparent benefits disappeared. Then came the randomized trials. Suzhen Duan and colleagues at Purdue in 2021 tested the “Best Possible Self” intervention—that is, the Happiness Course. Results: no significant improvement in wellbeing. The control group actually had better outcomes at a one-month follow-up. Louise Lambert and colleagues, in 2022, evaluated a semester-long happiness course at UAE University with weekly positive psychology interventions. Result: no changes in life satisfaction, stress, emotions, or mental health. Then, in 2024, Yale’s Santos followed up with students who’d taken her course one to two years earlier. The benefits for the group as a whole had disappeared. (Big props to Santos for studying and publishing this—the mark of a serious scholar.)

So What’s Needed to Make Flourishing Work?

Let flourishing be an end in itself. We’re not doing this for better academic outcomes, like SEL advocates tried. We’re not doing it for better jobs, like the “21st century skills” movement tried. We want kids who are not on the couch mindlessly scrolling, who are living fuller lives, who understand themselves and get along well with others—regardless of whether this improves math proficiency.

Agree on what we’re talking about. Jal Mehta, professor of education at Harvard, argues we need “to use real, non-jargony words that are specific and clear and connect to what you actually intend for students. If you, as a teacher or a school, decide you want to work on one of those things, present the rationale for why and then try to be specific about what improvement might look like.”

This will be hard when different major institutions define flourishing so differently. Mike’s not sure schools and teachers should seek to promote flourishing. Jenny is more convinced it can be integrated into curricula and activities during a student’s day. But we agree that anyone trying to pursue flourishing should identify what they are after and measure it to see if it’s happening.

Don’t overpromise. Explain what the goals are, what success will look like, and have the courage to call out what’s not working.

“It’s crucial but extraordinarily tough for those driving the bandwagon to police who’s along for the ride,” says Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. “And because it’s such an unpleasant task, it rarely gets done.”

He cites SEL as a cautionary example: “Everyone who says their stuff is SEL is free to do so. And in a field replete with junk science, shoddy vendors, and ideologically motivated authorities, a lot of dubious stuff gets adopted. The result is bad for kids and toxic for SEL as an enterprise.”

The flourishing movement is young yet already at a crossroads. Will it learn from these failures and build something real?

Jenny Anderson is co-author of The Disengaged Teen and a senior fellow at the Center For Teen Flourishing (and has advised LearnerStudio). Mike Goldstein is the co-founder of the Center For Teen Flourishing.