by Cheryl Lacey, DGSJ, ©2026
(Apr. 20, 2026) — Harvard University’s “Human Flourishing” program, housed within its Institute for Quantitative Social Science, began in 2016. With an investment of $43.4 million USD and data from over 200,000 paying participants, it represents a decade-long effort to measure what has been debated for centuries.
Their materials frame flourishing as a multidimensional ideal, one that necessarily includes an individual’s relationship with their community.
Schools have embraced this initiative with good intentions, engaging in questions of happiness, meaning, virtue, and purpose. But the questions themselves are not new.
Consider one of Harvard’s measures:
“I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later.”
(0 = not true of me, 10 = completely true of me)
This is simply delayed gratification, something Aristotle explored through the concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom.
Another asks:
“Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?”
(0 = not true of me, 10 = completely true of me)
Is this not, in essence, a compression of Aristotle’s broader philosophical project into a single question?
Ayn Rand would likely reject it outright. For Rand, flourishing is not something you feel your way into, it is something you think, choose, and reason your way toward. From that perspective, the question itself is unclear: worthwhile to whom, and by what standard?
The language of “flourishing” may seem new in education, but it’s only a reframing of familiar ideas that still fall short.
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