Happiness and Education.

There is significant debate about the place of happiness in education. At an intuitive level, most people agree that education should contribute to the overall sum of human happiness and that schools should be happy places to be and that they should make children happier.

However, schools and educationalists who put their heads above the parapet and suggest that there is a necessary link between education and happiness, sometimes find themselves caught in the crossfire. Many objections to teaching happiness rest on fundamental misunderstandings of what happiness might be and an ignorance of the rich variety of interpretations of the nature of happiness. Some think that teaching happiness means teaching children to be relentlessly 'positive'. Others think it means that we should take every opportunity to boost our students' self-esteem and protect them from failure. Others object that happiness just can't be taught. Often the worst critiques of the place of happiness in education fail to critically engage with different understandings of the nature of happiness (and other terms such as 'optimism'), or focus in on a narrow aspect of what is being practised in schools to make more generalized criticisms. This won't do. If we are to have a meaningful debate about this, we must at least be clear about what we are debating.

Our approach is based upon what is called the activity approach to happiness, which is the idea, most closely associated with Aristotle, that happiness arises from doing things well, from being excellent. As such then, schools have a dual role in the promotion of happiness: to provide a formal curriculum which enables children to acquire and develop strengths and talents and give them the opportunity to exercise them, supplemented by extra-curricular and pastoral provision. This might be called education as happiness: in other words, what happens in schools enables children to experience happiness by doing things well. The second responsibility, is to share the rich understanding of happiness that human civilization has evolved over thousands of years with students, so that they can feel informed about what kinds of thing they can choose to do or avoid that will maximise their happiness in life: this might be called educating for happiness. It is vital that both elements appear in a school community so that children can experience what makes them happy, but also have that higher level discussion about the nature of happiness itself.

Suggested reading.

The Good Childhood Report by Richard Layard and Judy Dunn

Lessons from a New Science? by Judith Suissa in New Philosophies of Learning edited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis

Education for Flourishing by Harry Brighouse in Why do we Educate? Edited by Wiens and Coulter

Happiness and Education by Nel Noddings

What's the Point of School? by Guy Claxton

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle