School and well-being: education, self-determination and adult-imposed aspirations

Schools, as diverse communities where children live much of their daily lives, are significant for their impact on children’s well-being. The chapter is a nuanced exploration of how the children we talked with in our research project, respond to the potentially contradictory expectations school poses for experiences of well-being in the present and well-becoming in the future. We move beyond describing the tensions between well-being and well-becoming by framing our discussion around what children told us about their experiences of well-being at school, in terms of opportunities to pursue agency and competency, defined in our discussion as self-determination, and the requirements to prepare for a future, what we refer to as adult-imposed aspirations. We argue, from our findings that, while the opportunities school provides children for self-determination promote their sense of well-being, the pressures from adult-imposed aspirations, particularly for secondary school children, can undermine well-being in the present.