Hugh van Cuylenburg

Van Cuylenburg was teaching in a village in northern India where the children had almost nothing and were noticeably happier than the students he taught at home, and he built a schools programme out of trying to explain the difference to himself. The Resilience Project sets it out as gratitude, empathy and mindfulness, and it now runs in Australian schools, workplaces and sporting clubs. He also writes about his sister, who was seriously ill with anorexia through his adolescence, and about how little the family knew what to do. The programme is a business and the book is its front door, which does not make the schools work less real.