Integrating the pursuit of happiness in educational settings
Education is supposed to be liberating and not binding young minds with ropes of despair, anguish, hopelessness.The need of the hour is to teach them happiness.
The higher education landscape in India has witnessed a rapid expansion of sorts with over one thousand universities, 42 thousand plus colleges and 40 million plus students thus claiming to be the world’s second largest educational system. These numbers are cheering especially in light of the demographic dividend that we as a country are looking forward to reap.
Apprehensions on the quality of education and increasing commercialization have been repeatedly raised by various stakeholders; and they have not always remained unaddressed. The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, specifically envisages developing a higher educational system that enhances student learning experience. To quote from the Policy: “A quality higher education must enable personal accomplishment and enlightenment, constructive public engagement, and productive contribution to society. It must prepare students for more meaningful and satisfying lives and work roles and enable economic independence.”
Clearly, the youth bulge will translate into a dividend only when the educational system equips them with not only the necessary job-ready skills but also transforms them into happy holistic individuals, ready to adapt and willing to contribute. But with reports like one in seven youth suffering from depression or more than 35 students taking their lives every day, one wonders what kind of distress educational systems are putting our students through!
Anxiety issues and panic attacks have become usual in classrooms and every other student is going through some form of therapy. Students undoubtedly are grappling with academic stress, peer pressure, financial stress and all of this will also have repercussions on their productivity as students or future members of the workforce.
Education is supposed to be liberating and not binding young minds with ropes of despair, anguish or hopelessness. More than anything else that a university or a college can teach, the need of the hour is to teach them happiness. Can happiness be taught? Can it be learnt?
Many universities in India, on the recommendation of the NEP, have initiated courses on psychology, emotional well-being, or health & wellness offered as ability enhancement courses. Internationally, universities such as Harvard and Yale also offer courses on mental health and well-being and the New York Times reported 3.3 million online learners signing up for the course on Science of Well-Being offered by Yale university via Coursera. Popularly known as the Happiness course, it teaches students to ‘rewire’ their minds, track their habits, become more mindful to avoid upward comparison and bring kindness, gratitude and meditation into their routines.
Happiness can be taught and it should be taught more. In our very own Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks to the depressed, distraught warrior Arjuna on the most salient topics of psychology, well-being and more. Working without being obsessed with results is one of the principal themes from the Gita, which if inculcated in academic life will provide students with the much needed equipoise. Additionally, he counsels Arjuna to not imitate others work but rather stick to one’s own work as per the ability and aptitude. There is ‘rewirement’ too when he highlights the need to regulate our lives with not too less or too much amount of food, sleep and recreation.
There is extensive discussion on what the psychology Professor at Yale, Prof Santos calls ‘the annoying features of the mind’. Through an extensively methodical presentation on the functioning of the mind at three levels; goodness, passion and ignorance, the Gita explains how prudent choices can be made to improve our state of well-being and become happy by ‘rewiring’ the mind in goodness. For instance, one of the annoying features of the mind is to either hanker for something in the future or lament for something in the past. But living in the present, tolerating both adversity as well as prosperity, is the key to happiness. Truly enough, for students it is not just academic failure that causes stress but also academic success; when they are faced with increasing expectations coupled with confusion resulting from a variety of opportunities that come knocking. The ideas of transience and insignificance that are laced with the momentousness of one’s unique identity in the Gita evoke the most profound values of gratitude, kindness and empathy in an individual motivating them to give their best with a sense of resilience. Acting on impulse with the fear of missing out or the fear of failure seems to prompt many students time and again to give up.
This lesson on happiness, however, is both ambitious and arduous to teach, harder than it is to learn. We as teachers need to have cracked the happiness code ourselves first in order to pass it on to students. Speaking from psychological theories, empirical evidence or citing from the Gita will act as mere lip service; teaching by example however, can contribute to students’ wellness greatly. In as much as an orange when squeezed can give only orange juice, a happy teacher can exuberate only happiness in class when embraced!
A cynic, arrogant and sadist teacher will only bring gloom to the class no matter how brilliant they are in their domain. One ‘happiness’ class in the curriculum may not enhance the ability of students but a collective, collaborative effort by all teachers as well as parents certainly will.
Happier students will emerge from an educational system that acknowledges and acts on their developmental needs at all three levels; physical, mental and spiritual. Beginning with schools, reinforced in homes, sustaining in universities and practiced daily, happiness can be taught and learnt. Grounded in our roots and ancient wisdom, it is time to train both the teacher and pupil in the Gita and beyond to ease the burden of our depressed adolescents, our posterity.
Author Prof. (Dr.) Pushkarni Panchamukhi, Associate Dean, School of Economics, RV University, Bangalore. Views expressed here are personal.
