Educating for Purposeful Living

Book excerpt: This book contains a simple argument. Young people who develop a sense of purpose around contributing to the lives of others and the society will find great personal fulfilment in life and will do more than other young people in creating a better world for all people. Living purposefully contributes to better physical and mental health, and to resilience, as well as to pro-social behaviour. However, surveys of 9,500 secondary school students in non-government schools showed that only a little over a third of them (36%) definitely had a sense of purpose. More needs to be done to help students develop patterns of purposeful living.