Repensando el camino hacia el florecimiento: Educación, epifanía y una vida que vale la pena vivir

Douglas Yacek; Mark Jonas

doi:10.9781/rep.2025.497

Authors

Douglas Yacek TU Dortmund University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6275-5845
Mark Jonas Wheaton College - Massachusetts

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.9781/rep.2025.497

Keywords:

well-being, education, transformative teaching, meaninful life, philosophy pedagogy

Abstract

How can education contribute to human flourishing? In our previous work, we have argued that transformative methods of teaching and learning are the most compelling available for advancing the flourishing of young people in the classroom. Although the idea of an education for flourishing has been the topic of some controversy in the last few years, with some scholars forcefully defending and some rejecting the notion as a guiding aim of education, much of this discussion has occurred at a high level of abstraction, focusing on the philosophical foundations and ethical implications of flourishing as a concept. Parallel to this debate, there has been growing interest in an approach to education based on a popular course at Yale University called the “Life Worth Living” Framework, which has a stated focus on offering guidance to students for “defining and then creating a flourishing life.” In this paper, we engage with the Life Worth Living framework, as it presents a provocative case study for examining the potential risks and rewards of educational programs designed to foster students’ flourishing. At the same time, the framework raises important questions about what it means to teach for flourishing, since the way it understands how flourishing is advanced operates on several philosophical premises that, to our minds, deserve closer examination.

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Author Biographies

Douglas Yacek, TU Dortmund University

Douglas W. Yacek holds a PhD in Philosophy and Psychology from The Ohio State University (2017), is an educational researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund and Professor of Ethics and Multiculturalism at HSPV NRW, both in Germany. In 2024, he was awarded the Life Worth Living Teaching Fellowship from Yale University, and in 2021, the TU Dortmund Award for Teaching Excellence. He has worked for several years as an English teacher in Aschaffenburg, Germany, and as a mechanical engineer in Puget Sound, USA. His research interests include student motivation and engagement, moral and democratic education, the ethics of education, teacher training, the history of pedagogical thought, and understanding how transformative experiences can become an educational goal.

Mark Jonas, Wheaton College - Massachusetts

Mark E. Jonas holds a PhD in Philosophy of Education from Columbia University (2009) and is Professor of Education at Wheaton College (United States). His primary focus in initial teacher training is not on providing a single teaching method, but rather on motivating students to cultivate ethics and develop a liberating, authentic, and dynamic educational practice. His research focuses on the history of the philosophy of education and, more specifically, on the dialogue on the ideas of justice, virtue, beauty, and education present in the thought of authors such as Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, among others.

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