Lessons from a New Science? On Teaching Happiness in Schools

Abstract

Recent media reports about new programmes for ‘happiness lessons’ in schools signal a welcome concern with children's well‐being. However, as I shall argue, the presuppositions of the discourse in which many of these proposals are framed, and their orientation towards particular strands of positive psychology, involve ideas about human life that are, in an important sense, anti‐educational.

Positive Psychology and Positive Education: Old Wine in New Bottles?

“…This move came on the heels of an extensive 2005 pilot program in primary schools called SEAL (social and emotional aspects of learning, which is similar to the U.S.-based SEL, or social emotional learning). A clear connection seems to obtain between the ideas behind this new happiness initiative and recent theoretical inroads made by positive psychology in the United Kingdom (Suissa, 2008).…”

“…In a similar vein, Alastair Miller (2008) argued that positive psychology exclusively promotes a particular personality type: a cheerful, outgoing, goal-driven, status-seeking extrovert, who is nothing in the end but a shallow careerist. Judith Suissa (2008) bemoaned the reduction of happiness to measurable empirical outcomes. She rued the exclusion of a "normative dimension" to education, which makes the alleged quest for happiness not only shallow but antieducational.…”

Reinforcing the ‘diminished’ subject? The implications of the ‘vulnerability zeitgeist’ for well-being in educational settings

“…Galton & Page, 2014). In a similar vein, those who adopt a more philosophical sense of wellbeing, seeing it as living a worthwhile life, claim it can be promoted through the proper teaching of literature and history (Suissa, 2008). Other philosophers argue that the study of religious education might provide a lens through which the wellbeing agenda in schools could be re-framed and moved away from an instrumental skills-based approach (Pett, 2012).…”

“…Instead, as we have observed, philosophers challenge a diminished view of a 'rounded' education by arguing that much richer cultural, literary, philosophical, political and spiritual meanings can help children and young people develop more subtle understandings about emotions, their effects and moral dimensions (e.g. Suissa, 2008;Cigman, 2012;Clack, 2012;Pett, 2012). These perspectives reveal that the diminished subject of many emotional wellbeing and social and emotional learning interventions is both the hapless, irrational, emotionally vulnerable and naive human subject and the curriculum subject of wellbeing itself.…”

Emotion Education without Ontological Commitment?

“…Kristjánsson 2007;Suissa 2008;Cigman 2008)-they appear to share at least five basic assumptions: moral, developmental, epistemological, methodological and educational (although these are rarely stated systematically and explicitly). Let me elaborate each of these assumptions in turn:…”