Expert Answers How Schools Work Around The World

I'm Rebecca Winthrop, global education expert.

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I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

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Which country has the happiest students?

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There's really two ways to look at this.

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You can look at children's wellbeing,

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or you can look at student satisfaction.

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And children's wellbeing-the UN has a measure for this.

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It's mental health, physical health, skill building,

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like literacy, numeracy, and if kids make friends easily.

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And we know that topping the charts

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is the Netherlands, Denmark, and France.

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who have really high levels of wellbeing.

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is a question of students' life satisfaction.

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And there is something really strange going on

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when you look at a whole bunch of countries' data

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around 15-year-olds' life satisfaction compared to adults.

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The richer a country gets, the happier,

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or higher life satisfaction adults have,

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you can buy a car, maybe go on vacation.

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But the opposite is true for 15-year-olds.

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They report less and less life satisfaction,

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that it was education doing it to them.

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Learning intensity was the problem:

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that schools got way more competitive.

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Kids started feeling like they were in a pressure cooker

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as countries got richer and richer.

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So that's another way to look at happiness in…

Original source: https://www.wired.com/