Unwrapping the Gift Box: Exploring School Children’s Happiness and Unhappiness in Türkiye, from a Causality Perspective

Abstract

In the face of the distance between logic and emotion, it is a difficult process to examine the happiness of humankind, who is in a fight of existence with these ideas and feelings. Considering that the ultimate goal of pedagogy is to make people happy through education, it will immediately be understood that it will become even more difficult to investigate children's happiness. It was aimed to investigate the causes of happiness and unhappiness from the eyes of the teacher and the child, and the research was designed with a qualitative method. The data were collected by enabling teachers and prospective teachers to observe primary school children and by conducting interviews with them. A kind of conceptual photograph of children's happiness and unhappiness was tried to be taken from the data obtained as a result of the content analysis. The children explained their reasons for being happy almost with justifications related to not being unhappy. In order to be happy in the eyes of children, it is necessary not to fail, not to be alone or not? to compete, and it is necessary for them to be motivated. The happiness values of male and female children differ from each other.