What do you most want for your children?
If you are like the thousands of parents I’ve asked this question, your responses included
“happiness,” “confidence,” “contentment,” “fulfillment,” “balance,” “purpose,” “good stuff,”
“kindness,” “health,” “satisfaction,” “love,” “being civilized,” “meaning,” and the like. In short,
wellbeing is what you most want for your children.
What do schools teach?
If you are like most parents, your responses included “achievement,” “thinking skills,” “success,”
“conformity,” “literacy,” “mathematics,” “work,” “test-taking,” “discipline,” and the like. In short,
what schools teach is how to succeed in the modern workplace.
There is almost no overlap between these two lists.
I am all for success at work, but this book asks you to imagine that schools could, without
compromising either side, teach both the skills of wellbeing and the skills of achievement.
Imagine Positive Education.
Here’s how Positive Education began. I was on a speaking tour in Australia in January 2005 when I
had a phone call from a voice I had never heard before. “Good day, mate,” he said, “This is your
student, Dr. Trent Barry.”
“My student?”
“Yeah, you know that live 6-month telephone course—I woke up at four in the morning every week
to listen to your lectures from the outskirts of Melbourne, where I live. It was fantastic, and I was a
fanatic, but I never spoke up. (I had given four iterations of 24 lectures on the telephone to about
1000 “listeners” a few years earlier.)
“We want to helicopter you to Geelong Grammar School. I am actively involved in the School and my
children go there. We are in the middle of a fundraising campaign
Foreword
for a Wellbeing Centre. We want you to talk to the alumni and help us raise money for the
campaign.”
“What is the Geelong Grammar School?” I enquired.
“It is one of Australia’s great schools, it has deep pockets, and it needs a new gym,” he went on, “but
the Council said we want wellbeing for the kids, not just a building. I told them about Seligman—
they had never heard of you—and now they want you to come and convince the donors that
wellbeing can actually be taught and that a curriculum can be mounted to give the new building real
meaning.”
So, my wife, Mandy, the kids, and I boarded a helicopter on a rickety platform in the middle of
Melbourne’s Yara River, and 6 minutes later we were at Trent’s home. Mandy whispered to me as
we landed, “I have an uncanny feeling that we are going to spend our sabbatical here.”
Mandy, as usual, was prescient. I spent the day meeting the council members, donors, and senior
faculty. The financial goal, I’m told, was reached that day. We did spend our sabbatical at Geelong
Grammar School in 2008, and Positive Education was founded then and there.
However, the tale would be incomplete without a few words about our family time at Geelong
Grammar School. Nikki, the founder of Positive Psychology (“If I can stop whining, you can stop being
such a grouch,” uttered at the age of 5 years), was now 16. She boarded at The Hermitage and
flouted the parietal rules on the very first day. Moreover, she and her friends would appear for huge
American breakfasts most mornings at the Chaplain’s house where we lived. Darryl, now 14, chose
to enter Year 10 at Corio rather than live at Timbertop doing Year 9, which would have been the
chronological choice. He boarded at Manifold House and became a rugby fanatic. We followed him
and his team around Victoria every weekend getting to know this wonderful sport as well as the
surrounding schools. Darryl and Nikki thought the work was easy, and they tried to emulate the laid-
back attitude of their classmates towards the present and the future—without any success. They
speculated that the ingredient that East Coast American kids lacked for a laid-back attitude was the
confidence of their place in their culture that their classmates had about Australia. Carly and Jenny,
aged 4 and 7, lived with us at the Chaplain’s house, where we continued to home school them,
concentrating on Australia’s history and culture. Lara stayed at home in Philadelphia to complete her
freshman year at Penn.
Most significantly the family was welcomed into a positive community—the Geelong Grammar
School community. The concept of “community” was new to us. We have lived in Wynnewood,
Pennsylvania, for 25 years, but it is not a community. It is a bedroom suburb of Philadelphia, and it
does not even have sidewalks. I have worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychology
Department for 50 years, but it is not a community. What unites the faculty of the University is little
more than a common interest in finding good parking spaces, and as the Psychology faculty has
grown more diverse, it has become half a dozen feudal kingdoms, each primarily concerned with
enhancing its own territory. Consequently, living in a positive community for 6 months was a new
adventure for our family.
You will read at length in the following chapters how Positive Psychology came to pervade the whole
Geelong Grammar School community. The lesson I draw from my family’s experience was that
Positive Psychology will most easily take root within an already existing positive community.
Professor Martin Seligman
