Others argue that schools have become too soft, with too much "heart" and not enough "mind". Last year was the first time that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris began measuring the well-being of the young around the world. So now educators everywhere are paying unprecedented attention to the emotions of their students. While for some this is change for the better, others worry that we are raising a "strawberry generation" that is too easily bruised to master the challenges of our rough-and-tumble world. 

These different opinions place educators in conflicting situations. Too much academics, and we wonder if we're stifling the emotions and damaging our students' creativity. Too much attention to well-being, and we fear that we might be undermining their intellectual development. 

How should we respond? 

First, let's acknowledge that influentials critics have misled the public on the purposes of education. Ken Robinson is the best-selling author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. For Robinson, the purpose of education is to find a passion and then pursue it with everything you have. This sounds good at first and Robinson is a brilliant storyteller. He shares colourful anecdotes about ballerinas, drummers, and painters who were outsiders in school but persisted because they had all-consuming passions that made their lives intrinsically rewarding. 

But there's a problem here. We have to acknowledge the ways in which dangerous passions - drugs, alcohol, or gambling, for example - have destroyed countless lives. How can we tell which passions are healthy and which are not? This ability to use our reason to form sound judgements has to be developed. Our schools are the right places to learn how to think through complex matters deeply and with discipline. This is why every society builds schools and why they are so highly valued around the world. 

Second, critics are right that too many schools have become soulless factories that emphasise memorisation. When academics become devoid of purpose and empty of emotions, we're developing systems that undermine the natural idealism of the young to be engaged with the world and to serve a larger purpose. There was great concern last year when new OCED data with high levels of anxiety. The data signalled for a more balanced curriculum, less high-stakes testing and greater opportunities for all students to thrive. New offerings in the popular "Learning for life" programme that supports sports, the arts and experimental learning throughout the system is one example. 

So, a healthy school system educates hearts and minds. But we can't just balance hearts and minds and be done with it. Why not? We can do everything possible to make our students happy (in there hearts) and to make them as smart as we can (by training their minds). Unfortunately, if we don't do these things in the right way, we could produce students who are happy, smart and superficial - or even worse, utterly self-absorbed. There is evidence that is what happened with the ill-fated self-esteem movement in the US.

What to do? It's time to move beyond a limiting instrumental imperative of educational change to embrace a more daunting existential imperative to help our students to develop lives of meaning and purpose. Some of this can be done by exploring new pedagogies that allow students to chart out what they might want to accomplish with their lives and why. Some of it could involve curriculum revision so that students have opportunities to read of inspiring individuals who overcame adversity to serve others and to improve the human condition. These things require educators to get better at listening to our students, patiently probing with them how they envision their lives and encouraging them with kindness and forbearance. 

Can we do these things? Absolutely! It surely is possible to avoid the siren calls of those who call for passion without intellect just as we must ignore traditional habits of emphasising academics at the cost of well-being. These things are being done already in many of our best schools. I've described many of them in my book, The New Imperatives of Educational Change: Achievement with Integrity.

Our biggest challenge is to help our students find an ennobling meaning and purpose for their lives. This is a demanding goal, to be sure. It runs straight up against so many currents of a now well-established "impulse society" that promotes instant gratification for virtually every desire. But we can and must do so much better than this. 

Everyone has a part to play in shaping a better world. The young posses a natural idealism. What better role can our schools play than to help them to channel it?