The faster globalisation and digitalisation are compressing time and space around us, the more people will need to find emotional stability and grounding. Perhaps this is one of the most undervalued missions of schools in the 21st century.
Most would associate PISA, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, with comparative data on academic success in school subjects such as mathematics or science, but PISA also provides the largest and most up-to-date database on social and emotional outcomes. In 2022, PISA asked large representative samples of students in 81 countries how happy they were with their life. While one could think that, for 15-year-olds, school might be the last place they associate with their well-being, the data show that the two strongest predictors of student life satisfaction were their relationships with their parents as well as their life at school.
There are other ways in which PISA data can, at times, be at odds with our expectations. In Ukraine, a country under daily attack, with already hundredths of schools obliterated by Russia’s military aggression and much of school life taking place in shelters, students feel safer in their schools than on average across OECD countries and much more so than in countries like, say, the United Kingdom or the United States. They also reported a higher emotional sense belonging and greater social connectedness in school than in the latter. But that’s a surprise just at first glance. Last week I visited School 25 in Vinnytsia, a public school in a less affluent area of the city, where students, teachers and parents worked since even before the war to make values, an Ukrainian identity and students’ sense of belonging the central mission of education.
