"Education significantly shapes how children will define their happiness"

I have been reading Amy Gutman – and was struck by her analysis that

“Education itself significantly changes how children will define their happiness once they become adults.” p68 in The Problem of Education Utilitarianism and Rights Theories in "Mill's Utilitarianism"

The media reporting on the suicide of a vulnerable student from a local school has seen me thinking a lot about student happiness this week.

The 17-year-old Takapuna Grammar student was found dead at his home 13 days ago - a day after he suffered a severe beating at school, reported to have been watched by 15 students and recorded on a mobile phone video.

He was being treated for depression at the Waitemata District Health board's mental health unit for adolescents.

I am thinking about this from the perspective of a parent with sons of a similar age, and I am thinking about it as an ex secondary teacher, I am thinking about it ... . and it is uncomfortable and desperate thinking from any perspective.   

Gutman argues that encouraging “happiness” per se is not a reasonable utilitarian standard for education ...

How is society to prepare children for the pursuit of their own, self-defined happiness? Children cannot themselves determine the particular ends of education, nor is maximising their present happiness a reasonable utilitarian standard for education, if only because the rest of their life is likely to be much longer than their childhood. Yet what will make children happy in the future is largely indeterminate. To make matters more complicated still, education itself significantly changes how children will define their happiness once they become adults. To guide the education of children, utilitarians need to find a standard that is not tied to a particular conception of the good life and that is not derived from the circular argument that if they become happy adults their prior education must have been good. P68

And society expects schools to worship economic advantage through the knowledge economy and global consumerism, something which University of Waikato academic Martin Thrupp addresses when he looks at school zoning, and the economic, class and ethnic separatism that leads to societal resentments and unhappiness. Education’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’: Part One – Persistent Middle Class Advantage pdf New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, Volume 4, Issue 2, 77-88, 2007 

And yet listening to parent after parent at student interviews would suggest that “happiness” aligned with some small measure of institutional compliance tops achievement in the forefront of many parents expectations/ needs. 

When I remember some of the children I have known as three and four year olds and then compare the exuberance of their pre-school sandpit social play with their social lives transitioning from school as young adults I am reminded of Sue Vickerman’s Oyster Catcher poem 

The social decline of the oyster-catcher

Back then, you were the swaggering rocker
of wading birds; boldly-coloured, dazzling
in flight, the most conspicuous bird-of-shingle,
the loudest. I remember your effortless landings
on muddy sand-banks; your hot-shot red lenses;
how you eyed up the cockles. You always claimed
the most abundant mussel beds, the ones
on rocky outcrops in down-town estuaries,
the tangiest; always picked the best ridge of sand
for your high-tide roost. You were so cool
with your minimalist nest: no fuss; lay the eggs
on an exposed pebble shoal, let nature do the rest.

It was frequenting estuaries that brought you down.
Your stout, pale pink legs - not your best feature -
wandered too far in the long, dark winter. Increasingly
you nested by rivers, even on farmland, digging bluntly
in mud and soil when you used to be so at home
on rocky shores, on beaches. And thus it was

that your diet deteriorated from coastal molluscs
to earthworms. Now, even a good cockle year
doesn't bring you back. Instead you get into fights
over food. I've seen you poking through the rubbish
at night, spearing litter. I used to love watching you
on the beach, how you waited for a chance to strike
into an open shell, or simply hammered one free
with your powerful chisel-tipped bill.
But that was the coast, and this is now: not Norway,
not Iceland, but a long way up a northern river
with no shellfish. Only your clear, sharp
kleep voice tells me you're the same person.

It all leaves me wondering ..

If “Education significantly shapes how children will define their happiness” then ...

• What can schools do better to help children define happiness?
• What can families do better to help children at school define happiness?
• What can friends do better to help their friends at school define happiness?
• What can school students do better to help other students define happiness?
• What is our responsibility when using media and technology in helping children define happiness?
• What happened to “belonging”?

Comments

[SC]

The topic of youth suicide has also touched my psyche at the deepest possible level. My recent readings on social capital refer to Durkeims thesis on suicide from the 1890's that has been resurrected in the late 20th century: the thesis being that suicide isnt necessarliy an individual act but the result of a broader social phenomenum where individuals have no networks, or what we refer to today as social capital.
It's made me wonder that in schools too much emphasis is placed on learning (there, I've said it!) and that the primary objective of school is to provide a compass for adolsecent development, and that learning is just a subset of this broader theme.
I also came across a timely article yesterday looking at the historical perspective of happiness.
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/historical-secrets-to-happiness/
It's topic well worth much deeper exploration.

[Artichoke]

Thank you for helping me with this thinking SC ... I have to find out more about social capital,

RE: suicide isnt necessarliy an individual act but the result of a broader social phenomenum where individuals have no networks, or what we refer to today as social capital

... is such a very frightening thought SC when you think about the examination success outcome that is the focus of much league tabled secondary education and at the same time you read Sherry Turkle’s analysis of the unexpected outcomes of information communication technology -

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated

in Can You Hear Me Now? Sherry Turkle Forbes Magazine

[SC]

Try these. It seems seductive on face value, but there may be a dark side?
http://www.gnudung.com/
http://www.mapl.com.au/A13.htm
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/primer.htm

[Cherrie]

Hey - the quote grabbed me right away. Have been thinking about this over the past couple of days (coincidentally) and have decided (although I am known to change my mind) that happiness is one of those things you can't define or really attach to anything, for if you do, the happiness that once was or could have been, can evaporate.

I guess it's the Paradox of Hedonism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism) or 'head fakes' (Prof. Randy Pausch - search his 'last lecture', pretty inspiring) or...sailing - how to go against the wind you have to go at angles that are against intuition. Maybe if your goal is a straight line against the wind's direction (and in what situation is the path to your goal not flowered by obstacles and other resistances), then tacking allows you to at least cross that line several times, with every intersection being another learning experience (though in reality it's not discrete units as such). I guess this is the most reliable way of learning something, for what if you tried a straight line and never got anywhere because of the direct hit of resistance, or you moved straight, but on a line that doesn't intersect with your line of happiness? And in reality, it's never a straight line?

I don't know. This analogy is fresh off the grey matter. Not very well formalised, yet sort of old.

How do you define happiness? Or rather, how do you define emotions? e.g. I have had some new experiences lately that I'm pretty sure noone else has ever experienced and have new feelings that I don't recognise nor know how to deal with. How do I even give them a name to begin talking about them? I suppose explaining the situation might help discover parallels, but to explain everything in your life that may have caused those new emotions would take forever and be tedious? How does it work?

How many families/schools (i.e. adults) can define happiness?

In my mind (and maybe only in mine), "belonging" (as a topic at school) went in the same box as "Treaty of Waitangi". Could recite what it meant, but really didn't know what it meant until I was much much older. Yet we'd studied these things every year since primary school. In fact, I was surprised to find "Identity and Belonging" modules in my English and PE books (I was tidying up a few weeks ago) from primary and secondary schools. I don't ever remember having ever felt those things we discussed or ever understanding what they meant for life.

Re: suicide - it is so common, it's shocking. really really shocking. It's been about one year since I lost an extremely close friend and there are a large number of people who have tried/been successful that I know... the societal thing? I know that he kept reiterating to me that this society doesn't reward or favour people like him, whereas they favoured people like me. And it's too late in the evening to go into that discussion.

[Cherrie]

Actually, since you read so much I'm sure some of it must be online content. Do you use www.diigo.com? If you find it useful, add me as a friend. I'm habitually using it these days.

It's "social annotation".. as in you highlight, comment on stuff around the web and you can make them public, private, certain groups only, etc, etc. You can "clip" videos and other multimedia to store in your Diigo - like your virtual scrapbook with a social tinge.

[Artichoke]

Ahhh the lessons are recited rather than learned Cherrie –

Your comment does not surprise me … I wonder how many other “concepts” and “enduring understandings” suffer the same fate as “belonging” in terms of the meaning students take from their directed/ taught learning experiences at school

Our current interest in a concept curriculum or big ideas or even how we intend to integrate and sustain the abstract notions in the key competencies does trouble me - it is key to some of the day job work we do helping teachers planning learning experiences against SOLO to escape shallow understandings

I reckon part of it all is captured by Harpaz 2003 when he writes that our central picture in education is “Imitation” - Education as a mimetic chain – where Scientists copy the world/ Curriculum experts copy the sciences/ Teachers copy the curricula/ Students copy their teachers

An institutionalised practice leaving a whole generation of 21st Century learners with Pinky and the brain experiences at school

• BRAIN: Now, Pinky, if by any chance you are captured during this mission, remember you are Günter Heindriksen from Appenzell. You moved to Grindelwald to drive the cog train to Murren. Can you repeat that?
  
• PINKY: Mmmm, no, Brain, don't think I can.

And then there is the whole thing about collateral learning - or the hidden curriculum which applies both inside and (significantly I think) - outside of school - what does that teach about "belonging"

I like the going against the wind sailing analogy - I want to think about that some more

[ailsa]

Toulouse-Lautrec: The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. (At least thats what is cited on Moulin Rouge, may well be he never said it, but with bthe wonders of technology i have such wisdom at my fingertips if not imprinted in my heart and in my child's heart)

I know 'we' have always bullied, the technology has not suddenly increased such behaviours.
I know technology can create a sense of the invisible and of increased vindictiveness, i also know it creates opportunities for support that would otherwise not be there.

I cant fix the global or even the local, i can only act on a personal level, so i tell the ones i love that i am always there for them, and for those beyond this sphere, i do all i can to make it known that there are people there for them.

Sometimes this isnt enough or doesnt get through.

To such ends i donate what is left of my other life to training youhline counsellors and my doctoral research is dedicated to helping this voluntary agency in developing the services for young people using the platforms that young people feel most comfortable in using.

What i am sure of is that blaming the technology is too glib. Just as guns dont kill people, and people without guns are less likely to kill people, there is a complexity where technology makes things worse in some ways and better in some ways, and different in some ways and lived experiences are made better and worse and different also. Banning the one doesnt result in a causal effect where the other doesnt happen.
Treating people like they don't matter, rather than a focus on the medium used, seems to me to be something important. Something worth learning.

[ailsa]

sorry , i really should spellcheck, I meant to write Youthline.
And the closing comment was a little convoluted.
How we treat people matters, whether as means to an end or as ends in and of themselves, seems to me to be of essence.

[Artichoke]

How we treat people is core Ailsa – it helps them define “happiness” – how we are treated determines how we sense “belonging”

We feel like we belong when we believe we have something to contribute that is valued by the other. When we believe that when we contribute we will benefit in some way from the increased value of the other. When we share the stories of the other – laugh and cry together, when we compromise our actions and behaviours because of belonging - in terms of adopting responsibilities

I want to distinguish this response from the reported events preceding the death of the young student Ailsa – for the truth of what the media has chosen to report has yet to be determined and the role of technology will probably never be determined.

And I will agree Ailsa that it is simplistic to isolate and blame” technology for the ills in society and that currently this is a theme that our media is getting a lot of leverage from.

And yet some of the issues identified in Jenkins White Paper on Participatory cultures are important at a time when lowered participation barriers to producing content run at the same time as “unwritten and often imperfectly shared norms exist about acceptable or unacceptable conduct.”

• In Making Good, Fischman and coauthors (2004) found that high school journalists felt constrained by the strong social ties in their high school, unwilling to publish some articles they believed would be received negatively by their peers or that might disrupt the social dynamics of their society.What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel that same level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the ability to mask one’s identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediate consequences for antisocial behavior?
  One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become
  more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. P17

Jenkin’s question is significant for educators working with multiliteracies

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities?

When you read this it is really asking

• "How do we ensure that every child treats others as if they matter when thay act as media makers and as participants in online communities?

[Clay Burell]

Boy does this hit home. I work at an international school in Korea, with an American curriculum, and an almost entirely (Westernized) Korean student body.

All the parents think about is GPA and Ivy League and, failing that, the "SKY" (Seoul, Korea, and Yonsei) Universities - the Korean Ivy League).

Students in not only international schools, but also Korean public schools, are so pressured by their parents to gain admission to these universities that they are literally being schooled every waking hour: SAT Prep courses, night tutors, AP night schools, weekend English schools, the whole bit.

The suicide rate here is astonishing, especially after the national testing days. Koreans literally believe they're failures for life if they don't gain admission to one of these "elite" schools.

What really distresses me is the grip the American ETS (Educational Testing Service, parent of the SAT, AP, and other tests) has on Korean culture.

I'll let this student at my school take it from here. She did a 30-page Comic Life comic book called "The Successful Life." It's brilliant - and it's embedded as a slideshow on her blog.

[ailsa]

I agree Arti, though my emphasis would split the question further:
"How do we ensure that every child/person treats others as if they matter?"
"What makes this more and less likely. when using media as participants in online communities?"

Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1991). Connections. New ways of working in the networked organization. Cambridge: MIT Press.
write of how tech opens up and stimulates new ways of working and thinking. Their book illuminates both the benefits and complications of using technologies such as email in the workplace, but they predate txt and blogs. Nonetheless there are similarities that are worth considering.

[Janet Hawtin]

http://blip.tv/file/796357
this put my heart back in at the end of the week
thought you might like computers as poetry
thanks to rts

[Janet Hawtin]

and from there to here
http://www.ted.com/speakers/view/id/213

[SC]

Your link to 'Education's Inconveniant Truth' seems dead- i was ready for a look. Just letting you know :)

[Artichoke]

Thanks SC - the day job was screaming so I finished this post in a torrent of text ... and in the rush to capture the ideas I mislinked it - try this or http://www.teacherswork.ac.nz/journal/volume4_issue2/thrupp.pdf

have also fixed it in the post

[alexanderhayes]

Hi,

Perhaps happiness is at the core of systemic change ......a key attribute of humanity and in it's process to a state of being, enriching the lives of others it affects.

In present circumstances we try to bring light to what would otherwise remain contested and closed.

We hope you can join us .

http://talo.wikispaces.com/learninginthe21stcentury

http://talo.wikispaces.com/learninginthe21stcentury

[Bill Kerr]

I don't think happiness occurs through the pursuit of happiness but is an emergent property of struggle - not only physical struggle but the struggle to understand. That would be my general approach to minimising suicides. I say this because I don't notice anyone else saying it, but maybe I missed something (?)

[SC]

There was an interesting article recently Bill, exploring the historical perspectives of happiness that stated exactly what you're saying. Part of it read:
'......For example, in his book, Schoch relates the story of an 11th-century Iraqi scholar named al-Ghazali. Rather than trying to think positively or improve his lifestyle, al-Ghazali explored what his distress could teach him. He found that he had been valuing material possessions too highly, was ruled by his pride, and had reached a spiritual emergency. Continued thought brought him to a new philosophy: “cultivate the most precious form possible from the rough matter of your life.” His book, The Alchemy of Happiness, guided readers to transform their vices into virtues.....'

The full article can be found here:
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/historical-secrets-to-happiness/

[Janet Hawtin]

i am not sure if this monk is making pearls or focusing on the light but he does see a correlation between social happiness as a goal and mind work as a part of our social fabric. how does it work when the context is concentrated, urban and not remote. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/191

[Artichoke]

I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed to the ideas on happiness and thouight about the role of school in determining the future happiness of its students

- I had quite simple expectations when I wrote the post - I wanted to deny school the power to determine the future happiness of young people - I wanted to contest Gutman - and I still don't want to accept her claim - I don't want to give the flawed institution that is school so much power over anyones future happiness

However, your comments took my thinking in so many richer and broader directions and I have spent much of yesterday (first free time for a while)researching and exploring the new links and ideas offered.

I have discovered wondrous maverick educational thinkers - [think locally: act locally] [ask a kindergarten teacher what the future is going to be like][there isa massive and bizarre idea around that we have to bring more computers into schools ... my idea is get them out of schools and keep them out of schools] - listened to computers as poetry - seen numbingly beautiful images of Nepal, thought about the role of struggle and perseverence in learning and happiness, anguished over kids whose society values narrow definitions of educational sucess, revised or at least remembered to nurturing role of technologies and been compelled to purchase even more books for the my library in the corridor

So to SC, Janet, Cherrie, Ailsa, Clay, Alex, and Bill thank you, thank you thank you for helping me see many different textures of happiness and school.

[SC]

And then someone creates 'their' message using ICT's and 2.7 million people see it. I kinda like that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnGb6UQvwJs

[Artichoke]

Thanks SC ... I kinda like that too.