When Edward Mallen’s parents opened the door to find the police on their doorstep last week, it was to hear that the worst nightmare of any parent had come true. Their son had committed suicide after a three month struggle against depression. “We implore the authorities to reconsider the funding and resources directed towards alleviating the seemingly relentless spread of psychological disorders and anxieties amongst our young people,” they said: “Tragedies like this can and must be avoided.”

It is a complex paradox that at the very moment that we should all be feeling happier, we find a crisis in the growth of depressive illness and the attendant illnesses of addictions of various kinds. Society seems to have generated a depressive and addictive culture where my own image of myself is under constant attack. I am encouraged to feel a failure, that I am ugly or bald or fat or insufficiently gifted and even if I am supremely gifted, as Edward was, I may feel unable to cope for whatever reason. Anxiety and depression is an indiscriminate and paralyzing enemy that can hit any of us any time.

My question is a philosophical one; does the ethos of our education system help us? Does the relentless emphasis on competition and achievement actually help me achieve my best? Does the busyness of our age – the lack of reflection time – help us to place our own lives in perspective? Does a curriculum which doesn’t think horizontally between subjects, but vertically by subject, actually contribute to the goal of the flourishing life? Where the great dramas and indeed the crises of human experience are played out in literature, on film, in history, geography, science, even maths, and of course philosophy, are we taught to bring these things together and to see myself in a proper perspective?

My own belief as (broadly) an Aristotlelean, is that we are ill equipped by our education system to face the complexities of living in the modern age. My own belief is that we need to produce an integrated educational experience that helps us to evaluate and cope with the myths that are continually fed to us by the media – the Janus, two-faced media. If you’re wondering what I am talking about, here is a short list of three.

The myth of body image. We are persuaded by the never ending image of skinny, airbrushed models to think that my own body is deficient in some way. We read a stream of articles of how to be more….. whatever. Our schools need to educate us for body affirmation, but this goes deeper than the odd PSHE class. It needs to sink deep into an integrated philosophy of education where every class works together in every subject towards an ethical goal. To hate yourself is in the end a problem of ethics, and ethics is everywhere.

The myth of competition. We are encouraged to line ourselves up for comparison, one school against another or one person against another. We are continually graded, inspected and tested for ‘compliance’ against an external standard. But when we inspect the standard itself we find it is often hollow. The process is indeed laughable. Look for example at the way mark schemes operate or how we are now required to tick boxes to get an A grade, and you will realise just how far we have strayed from the path of wisdom.

The cult of celebrity. As I write this the Brits have triumphed at the Oscars and I am delighted that Old Etonian Eddie Redmayne has won an Oscar for best actor. But we need to be more reflective about the cult of celebrity. Celebrities have become the new gurus – the people who also write self-help books, the people we aspire to be. Witness the terrible trauma of people being voted off the X factor, or imagine the state of mind of the professional footballer who at the age of 18 is told there is no place for them any longer in the premiership academy and you will rapidly conclude, I think, that the cult of celebrity has caused us to dream big but ultimately to experience alienation, loneliness and grief.

I happen to think that David Cameron wasn’t being foolish when he introduced an idea of the Big society at the last election. But it lacked two things – one is an ethical basis in which a moral revolution begins as it were from the bottom up. Another is the truth that big societies are a collection of smalls societies composed of my village, my family, my company, my school.

Any revolution begins, as always, with you and me. It needs a philosophical revolution that then moves into a new embodiment (a new philosophy of the body, the school, the village, the family). But maybe it might start today where you are – reflecting on our own place in the whole, or my own drop in the ocean. For, as Kant may have observed, the moral ocean is composed of many drops, and my drop might just make the difference for Edward and any other person facing the darkness of an inner despair.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2952316/Talented-18-year-old-pianist-won-place-Cambridge-University-killed-train-suffering-sudden-inexplicable-lapse-depression.html#ixzz3SZXXK5vM