Following on from my post last time about a curriculum for kindness I thought I’d share this again, as it seemed so relevant and something people often lose sight of when thinking about education.
It’s a chapter from ‘A Home Education Notebook’ which explains why happiness is so important to education.
Why Happiness is so Important
Happiness is not something that people usually take into account much when considering education. The ministers and professionals who have created the schooling system certainly didn’t seem to do so, didn’t seem to ever ask; will this make our children happy? Because like most they think that happiness has nothing to do with it.
They would be wrong.
Now, you might also be thinking; isn’t that going off the subject a bit? What’s happiness got to do with learning?
Well, just about everything. Bear with me and I’ll explain.
Basically, unhappy children do not learn much, they’re too busy feeling uncomfortable and wanting it to be over than paying attention and thriving on what they’re being taught. Unhappy learners do not learn well. They do not engage with learning if the whole climate they learn in, perhaps noise, hubbub, crowds, pressure, makes them unhappy. Even worse, not only do they miss out on what’s being taught, they begin to develop unhappiness about the act of learning itself.
An unhappy association with learning itself can become a stumbling block that can carry on throughout all of a life and to have that happen is truly sad. For it is an inaccurate perception of the joy of learning which can enhance an individual’s life from beginning to end. Do you see many school children who appreciate the joy of learning or even consider it a joy?
The thing is, we all have to learn, grow, develop, and change constantly throughout our lives. Life throws at us constant challenges most of which require us to learn and change in some way, even if the tiniest ways. If we cannot do this comfortably, if we cannot do this learning and changing comfortably and happily, it sets us up for unhappiness on and off all through our lives.
For really that’s all education is; learning and growing and changing. And we need to be comfortable with it in order for it to continue.
All learning changes us a little, did you realise? As we assimilate new ideas and skills into our lives we have to let go of old ones; this requires us to change. Education is as much about growing and changing as it is about learning. And it starts from the minute we are born (probably even before) to the minute we die. We learn and change throughout the whole of our lives.
So education and learning do not only start and end with school years. A child learns enormous amounts before he even goes to school. He even learns one of the most complicated skills of all – the use of language through speech. And how many times have you heard people say that they learnt more when they left school than they did when they were there? We all certainly learn more of the valuable stuff outside of school – the stuff that gets us through our real lives.
Think about this for a minute. Dynamic thought isn’t it? The fact that education is taking place in our lives long before school years start and after it’s finished as well as during that time inside it. It’s so obvious really but many people never even think about it. And that pre and post school education takes place without teachers or classrooms, tests or curriculum or schedules, and even without being between the ages of four and sixteen.
So being comfortable with the idea of learning and changing throughout your life is one of the most important things that will make your life happy and successful. The two go hand in hand. For I don’t call an unhappy life a successful one however wealthy one becomes.
And it is that idea; that to be successful in life we must have some elements of happiness in it, that makes me realise that this must then also be true of education.
For there is no lesson more worthwhile than learning to be happy with learning. It’s a crucial part of educating, if you want it to continue.
Education is the mainstay of our lives. We learn new things all the time. The education that takes place in schools at that time in our lives is really only one small part of a life’s education. But sadly it is the one that everyone focuses on. And the one that seems to have the most devastating effect on all our learning after it.
And it seems to me that it is this part of a life’s education that is going so disastrously wrong for some children. And I believe the reason it’s going wrong has to do with one vital element; happiness! It’s because education in schools is tending to make children unhappy with learning.
In fact I would go so far as to say that it is making them unhappy in themselves, as well as with learning.
If our children are not happy in school they do not realise their best potential. They do not have happy lives or begin to understand what will make their lives happy in the future. And that’s really important because our children are the future, both personally and globally.
I’m not interested in happiness because it’s all twee and rosy and unrealistic. I’m very, very realistic and down-to-earth. And realistically I know that happy people make a much better society than unhappy people. Because generally speaking happy people do not violate or abuse one another, they do not commit crimes or vandalise, destroy or disturb. Happy people feel good enough about themselves to care for one another, care for the community, their environment, the planet. This is why happiness is so important. Happy people make the world a better place in all respects, corny though it sounds.
If the whole of our society is going to be happy then it must start with being happy with education, since education – our life-long learning and growing process – is vital for happy and successful lives. And since the chunk of our education takes place when we are young, mostly in schools, then it must start there.
Now I don’t know what goes on in all schools. I don’t know all there is to know about schooling or learning or education. I don’t know about all the current educational theories or all the up to date psychology of learning.
But I know what I see.
And I know what my heart tells me.
And my heart tells me that education in schools is not working. And it’s not working because, despite what schools tend to make us think, education is a matter of heart as much as it is of head. But education in schools has become only that – a matter of head.
The only concern the government seems to have is children’s heads. Most particularly what they can stuff into them, without any regard for their hearts.
Now I’m not saying that children cannot be happy with school or that all schools are unhappy places. That would be untrue.
What I am saying is that there seems to be an awful lot of unhappy, unwell, disheartened, unmotivated, even suicidal children between the ages of four and eighteen.
What happened to these children I wonder? What happened to their hearts and their heads? For I bet they started as bright and happy toddlers, investigating everything, into everything, intrigued by everything, nosy and inquisitive and desperate to learn as all children are. They don’t empty the kitchen cupboards or play with matches or climb in the washing machine for nothing. They do it because they want to find out. They do it because they want to learn. What happened to that desire to learn?
I watched it fade in my children. I’d seen it fade already in some of the children I taught in schools. I saw it in the boredom on their faces. I saw it in the resentment in their eyes. I saw children who were humiliated and shamed by a curriculum that wasn’t suited to them. I saw it in children who were disruptive from not having their educational needs met. I saw it in children who were withdrawn and depressed from not having their hearts attended to. I saw it in children who were apathetic with lack of fulfilment. And I saw it in young people who ran away from a system and environment that was totally inappropriate to their wonderful characters.
I saw it in all those children who were having their heads stuffed without regard for their hearts.
I believe what happens to children is that once their learning gets controlled by the politics of our current educational system they no longer receive the heartfelt education with which they started their lives.
You will probably have given your baby a heartfelt education when they were at home with you. You will have nurtured and taught and encouraged and developed skills within them, without even realising, that will have suited their needs and their characters, their gifts and their strengths. You will have made them feel important and loved and valued. You will have done this simply by parenting them in an attentive, heartfelt and respectful way.
All that can be transferred to home educating, where you can pay as much attention to their hearts as their heads.
I believe all of us all of our lives need, and have a right to, an education that is close to our hearts. That develops our heart’s desires as well as our heads. That starts from our individuality and builds on it. That values us as people for who we are and what we can do.
I do not believe a National Curriculum with an agenda that has little to do with an individual and a lot to do with political popularity can do this.
I believe education is essentially about humans, individual human beings, who should have their individualities respected. Not disregarded.
And we removed our children from school, just so they could continue the type of education that they started their lives with before they were totally and irrevocably switched off to learning for the rest of their lives like so many young people that I see.
During the time they were home educate we were forced to think very hard about education. For once our children’s education was no longer wrapped up in curriculum and tests and outcomes and objectives and exams, that someone else designed for some other need rather than those of our children, then we had to think what we wanted it to be without all that wrapping. We had to think what education really was, underneath all that.
We learned and changed a lot of times throughout our children’s education. For as I’ve said education goes on throughout our lives, both ours as well as the children’s. We came up with as many questions as answers.
The answers are never cut and dried and never the same for everyone. But by describing some of our Home Educating days throughout this book I’m hoping that I will help you begin to find some of your own answers. And what kind of an education will make your child happy and fulfilled, both now and throughout the whole of their lives.
And I hope by now you will understand that happiness does have something to do with it.
Ross Mountney's Notebook 