Initially based upon the principals of positive psychology, the positive education approach has much in common with a whole child approach to education and is contributing to the paradigm shift that is accentuating the non-academic variables of children's education for successful student outcomes.
Positive education is an approach of improving the well-being of children in schools through implicit and explicit programs. Although this approach as an idea is essentially not something that many find ground-breaking or contemporary, what is has done is brought into light an opportunity for school leaders to initiate a response to the problems associated with physical, social, emotional, and mental well-being of both staff and students. This response is becoming collaborative amongst like-minded schools and a wave of interest is moving across schools in Australia to implement programs outside of traditional academic circles and attends to the whole-child.
From its more modern conception in 1998, positive psychology had been described by leaders in the field such as Christopher Peterson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Martin Seligman as the study of what goes right in life, from birth to death and all in between. Rather than remedying the ills that decrease the opportunity of human flourishing, it is focused upon the good in life and the ways in which we can accentuate them. Psychology as a scientific field has a limited reach to the general population in comparison to a school, which places education systems as one the most suitable environments to teach students the skills and practices of living a flourishing life. There are quite a few sub-sections of positive education such as building resilience,