Happiness and education: Troubling students for their own contentment

Abstract

Currently higher education strategies seem to concentrate on the expedient, developing skills that can secure employment in the world of work. This may have immediate advantages, but in totalising pedagogic practice, it may restrict our openness to people and to our own contentment with ourselves. Valuable as this may be as a way to satisfy politicoeconomic policy imperatives, it strays from education as an edifying process where personal development represents, through the facing up to distress and despair, an unsettling of our developing identity and a negation of our immediate desire satisfaction. Such an unsettling is not intended to give pleasure or satisfaction in the normative way in which the imperative of happiness has been used in student satisfaction surveys, nor in the wider societal context that this totalisation represents. What I propose for higher education is not a dominant priority to feed the happiness for others, but a mission to personal contentment revealed through realising student potentialities for them and so recognising their limitations, as part of seeking an attunement to contentment.