By Naijing Guo, Director of Global Engagement & Partnerships at Baret Scholars

The World Happiness Report 2026 landed in March, and I’ve been mulling over the results as the end of the school year approaches: everywhere in the world except English-speaking countries and parts of Western Europe, young people under 25 are becoming happier and more optimistic. For the second consecutive year, not a single English-speaking country appears in the top ten happiest nations.

And for the social media generation, the effects of this optimism decline hit our girls hardest. An OECD study of over 270,000 fifteen-year-olds across 47 countries found that girls are disproportionally negatively affected by social media use compared to boys. The culprit is less about raw screen time and more about platforms designed for social comparison rather than authentic connection.

As an educator who works closely with young women, the question I keep returning to is: can we still build a sense of optimism, purpose, and possibility in the girls and young women in our care? And if so, how?

What brings me hope is that I may have seen the answer in our students at Baret Scholars who journey through 14 different countries in 8 months. They are exposed, in one year, to a variety of experiences that few have in a lifetime. This year connects them to the world and themselves. It’s this sort of human connection that may be the antidote to the pessimism and comparison that is so hard on young women.

Mia's story

Mia is a Baret Scholars alumna and graduate of Elmwood School, an ICGS member school. She's now studying Theatre at the University of Toronto. The through-line between her gap year and where she ended up is not incidental.

She arrived at Baret as a bright, thoughtful student. The kind who excels within structures but hadn't yet fully stepped outside of them. What the year gave her wasn't a new passion. She already loved theatre and made this very clear in her interview video. However, she came away from Baret with the conviction that she could actually do something with her passion. She reached out to local theatre groups in the cities she was living in, building collaborations from scratch, navigating language barriers and unfamiliar creative traditions. She created Baret's first ever student theatre production. In Cappadocia, she spent time with local pottery designers learning how to mold clay art during one of Baret Scholars 50+ Fellowships students selected from.

That shift from a passive consumer of art to passionate creator didn't come from a single lightbulb moment. It came from the accumulation of many small acts of initiative, each one making the next one feel a little more possible.
Here is Mia in her own words: 

"I became so much more self-assured because I've experienced what building something independently looks like."

That's the thing about learned optimism. It doesn't sound like bravado. It doesn’t really sound like anything. It shows itself in the steps a person takes every day to make their dream a reality.

What travel actually does to a young mind

But I want to be careful here, because this isn't about the romance of a journey. Sitting in an airport or ticking off landmarks doesn't build optimism. It requires and is earned through a very specific kind of friction.

It's earned through the discomfort of navigating a city where you don't speak the language and discovering you can manage anyway, through working alongside peers from 40 different nationalities and realizing that your assumptions about how the world works are just that: assumptions. It's earned when you find yourself faced with a genuine challenge, without a parent or teacher to rescue you, and finding that you rise to meet it.

Over nine months, across cities as different as São Paulo, Nairobi, Istanbul, and New Delhi, our Scholars see the world's complexity and become fluent in it. They build what psychologists would call self-efficacy: the deep, experience-earned belief that you are capable of navigating the unknown. That's not something you can teach in a classroom. But it can be constructed, experience by experience, over a year of sustained exposure to the genuinely unfamiliar.

The data from positive psychology backs this up. Diverse, challenging environments, particularly those that require genuine collaboration and problem-solving, are among the most consistent predictors of optimism development in adolescents. The world, it turns out, is one of the best classrooms we have.

So, to the question, can you teach optimism? In a lecture? Maybe not. In a handout? No. Or is it not taught but discovered, by each young woman who comes through, standing on the other side of a challenge, surprised by her own capacity, and just a little more willing to believe that the world is hers to figure out?

Yes. Absolutely, yes.

A note for IGCS educators: Baret Scholars is pleased to offer merit scholarships of up to $30,000 USD for students from ICGS member schools. To learn more, contact naijing.guo@baretscholars.org to register for interest for the upcoming webinar or book a time to chat with Naijing here.

Naijing Guo is an Oxford University-trained educator specialising in developmental psychology and the learning sciences. Having grown up between Hainan, California, and Wales, she knows first-hand how international experiences shape young minds. A Chinese children's book author, Diana Award judge, and EdTech co-founder, she currently leads Partnerships and Engagement at Baret Scholars, a global gap year program taking students across New York, São Paulo, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, New Delhi, and Beijing in eight months. She is particularly passionate about innovative education systems, positive psychology, and the transformative power of global learning.