There is a famous sentence in Thomas Jefferson's declaration of independence that formulates something essential about what most modern liberals believe about both government and education: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Some of us might not believe in the creator part, and all of us would assume now that by men Jefferson means men and women, but probably none of us would quibble with the idea that people are born, if not created, equal, and that they have a right to life and liberty. But what does it mean to have an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness? At first sight, it seems to be a pretty good idea; no one, presumably, wants to promote the pursuit of unhappiness. If we are convinced of anything now, it is that we are pleasure-seeking creatures who want to minimise the pain and frustration of our lives. We are creatures who, perhaps unlike any other animal, pursue happiness.
But fortunately, and unfortunately, the other thing we know is that pleasure, like happiness, is not as simple as we would like it to be; that people can be frightened of pleasure, or can hide their real pleasures from themselves; that they can use pleasure as a way of avoiding necessary pain (drinking alcohol or taking drugs, for example, to avoid intimacy or the useful and necessary awkwardness of social life); that they can get pleasure from their own pain and that of others; and that they can have competing pleasures (a child's pleasure in pleasing parents and teachers can outstrip the desire to avoid schoolwork, so he sacrifices his genuine—if short-term—interests for the love and approval of the grown-ups).
"A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy," the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote in Utilitarianism. Whether or not this is true—and I think in many ways it is—it raises the question of why happiness should matter to us at all. It has certainly become the focus of much debate. Anthony Seldon has introduced "wellbeing lessons" to the curriculum of Wellington College, where he is headmaster, and some would like to see the innovation rolled out across the country. Discussions of what makes a good life, and whether virtue can be taught, are as old as literate human enquiry. But happiness is now the thing, and so we need to have some idea of what the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of; whether education can make people anything (that is, how open to influence children are, and in what ways); and what the much-cherished phrase "making someone happy" might mean.
We should bear in mind at the outset a few obvious truths. First, that cruelty makes some people happy, and makes most people happy at least sometimes. Second, that it is not clear that the pursuit of happiness necessarily brings out the best in people; people can do terrible things as a means to the end of happiness. Indeed, the pursuit of happiness can make people immoral. And third, and most obvious, that what makes people happy is often very idiosyncratic, very personal and sometimes private. "Happiness," Freud wrote, "is something essentially subjective." School, of course, might help people find what makes them happy, but in this sense—and I will come back to this—it can't make people happy.
Some people say that the really valuable thing about psychoanalysis is that it is the one place left in the culture where you can be, and be seen to be, wholeheartedly unhappy. Whatever this says about psychoanalysis, it seems to me to be more of a comment about the extreme pressure we are under, and that we put our children under, to be happy; which also means not to be unhappy. You only have to give this a moment's thought to realise that something quite strange is going on; that the more terrible things that happen in the world, the more we are coerced into being or seeming or seeing ourselves as happy. If you should be happy—in the same way that alcoholics need everyone around them to drink—then what do you do with your unhappiness? If the problem of the alcoholic is sobriety, then the problem of the happiness-addict is his misery. It is unrealistic—a demand that cannot be met—to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn't make you happy, but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer, in a way that adults don't always realise, under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are. "Be happy" might be a paradoxical injunction like "Be spontaneous"; if you do it you are not doing it, and if you are not doing it you are doing it. The worst-case scenario would be generations of children cheated of what they were educated to believe was their right to happiness.
If the original question—the question in Plato—was "Can virtue be taught?" and this has become "Can happiness be taught?" we might wonder what the difference is, what the difference might be between school trying to make people good and trying to make them happy. One of the most obvious differences, as I alluded to before, is that being good doesn't always make children (or adults) happy. But if education should make you happy, what kind of morality is it going to teach, both implicitly and explicitly, in the service of this ideal? If, for example, school should make you kind, it would not be too difficult for adults, with a minimum of hypocrisy, to come up with a set of guidelines, a definition of what constitutes a kind act; and these would be a means to an end. But what kind of guidelines could be provided to help children be happy, given that happiness is, as Freud suggests, subjective, and that moral goodness does not always make the child happy (being good makes the child feel loved by those he needs, and therefore safe, but not necessarily very alive)? What is the morality if happiness is the aim?
Would the school have to say the paradoxical thing: our rules are made to be broken because we know that, at least for some of you, only transgression will make you feel fully alive, and that for some that feeling is the only authentic happiness? In promoting happiness in school, we would be promoting excitement rather than safety, at least for some. We would be saying—and this might be a good thing—don't avoid situations that might make you feel guilty, but learn to bear guilt. It is not that promoting happiness itself promotes risk; but it confronts the adults with the perennial question of whether, and in what situations, they prefer safety to excitement, or vice versa, for children. The pursuit of happiness can potentially give both children and teachers a more morally complex vision. Because teachers cannot know beforehand what will make a child happy, they will be unable to construct and impose a morality that will make him or her happy. It would be good to start our morality-making from an understanding of what makes people happy, rather than as a way of pre-empting them from finding out. The pro-happiness school will at best be a pro-moral improvisation school. This will put a heavy but interesting burden on the teachers. Happiness may be good as an ideal because it changes our views about morality; it allows children in school to have a more intriguing version of what morality might involve. But happiness as a moral demand—you must be happy, and you are failing if you are not—is pernicious.
If the pressure to be happy is disabling—what is the child under pressure to be happy going to do with her unhappiness?—the opportunity to be happy, or rather to find what makes you happy, can only be a good thing. And yet taking opportunities for happiness can be morally complicated, and can involve some unhappiness (think of the child at school preferring one friend over another, or wanting to study subjects of which his parents disapprove). The promoters of happiness, for example, often underestimate how much envy happiness provokes, and how much this is a problem for the envious and the envied; happiness as an ideal plays all too easily into the contemporary belief that a good life is simply an enviable life. So it seems to me that one thing education can do is help children find a language that can do justice to the pleasures and problems that happiness involves—and provide an environment in which they can begin to get a sense of the conflicts that happiness embroils them in. If, as John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you are making other plans, then so is happiness—perhaps by the same token.
One of the reasons I assume we think that education—or anything else, like parenting, or good looks or money—should or could make us happy is because we are all too aware of what makes us unhappy. We assume that if we take the unhappy-making thing out of the picture, our innate happiness will be there, waiting to happen. If we take the bully out of the class, the bullied will be happy. If I give up maths, I will be happy. But we can't use a version of logical common sense when it comes to happiness. It is better, indeed essential, that the bullying stops; but that in itself may not create the expected happiness. The bullied child, for example, may miss being bullied and seek punishment elsewhere; or he may miss the intensity of the attention he gets from the bully. Or, of course, he may be relieved and happier.
Schools, clearly, should do everything they can to diminish those things that are known to make children unhappy—elitism, bullying, excessive emphasis on competition as opposed to collaboration, boring or humiliating teaching, covert or explicit sexism or racism and so on. But I think it needs to be acknowledged that doing this may do no more, at least for some children, than create the preconditions in which they might find what makes them happy. What Philip Larkin in "Born Yesterday" called "a skilled,/Vigilant, flexible/ Unemphasised, enthralled/Catching of happiness…" can't be arranged for each individual child. Without these "good enough" conditions, which are hard enough to create, it is very difficult for the individual child to pursue his happiness; but with them, there can be no guarantee that his happiness will be there for the taking. This is why I think it is useful to think in terms of the child's official and unofficial development; and to think of schools as double agents, places that sponsor both the good, nice person, and the strange, eccentric, delinquent one that each child is. The good citizen pretending to himself or herself that she is not a furtive criminal, and the furtive criminal pretending that she is not a good citizen—this is not a recipe for the possibility of happiness. Unbearable choices make impossible lives.
The most important thing about school for the child is that it is not the family; it is another place (as it is, of course, also for the teachers). The so-called mental health professions often want to say that whether or not education should make you happy, it can't make you happy if your home doesn't, or if, more fatefully, you were born temperamentally unhappy. No one could, or should now, underestimate the significance of parents and siblings in a child's life; but this should not be used to obscure just what school can do for children. Nothing in the child's life will make him more unhappy than his family, or its absence, and a considerable amount of childrens' unhappiness in school is bound up with their family life; every teacher knows that teaching is never just conveying information, but rather a way of joining, at a distance, the families of all the children they teach. But because school is also another place—and no one should underestimate what it is like for a child to go from the closed world of the family to the open road of the school—it provides the possibility for new forms of happiness. Most of us remember as children going to other children's families and noticing, with various degrees of exhilaration and dread, that they did things differently there. And this is more true of school, because a school is not even a family, the only social group the child has previously known. Whatever else it is, school is the place where the child can both find new ideas about happiness and notice new ways of being happy. One of the most extraordinary things about other people, insofar as they exist for us, is the ways in which they can be happy. The child, given half a chance, can't help but notice, from other children and from the teachers, that there are many kinds of good life. They may even come across people at school who they admire who don't think happiness is very important, who believe, as Lionel Trilling did, that no morally serious person could be interested in happiness. So should education make you happy? It should, at least, show you the forms that happiness can take, and that you can't get from your family. The trouble with one's family is that that is all they are.
We should, of course, be wary of people who are keen to tell us that suffering is good for people; all suffering, it seems to me, is bad, but some suffering is inevitable. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't also be alert when we are promoting happiness, something that seems at first glance so self-evidently a good thing. Words and phrases like "wellbeing," "flourishing" and "fulfilling potential" all make us feel better; and no one in their right minds would want school to make children unhappy, or to stop them fulfilling their potential, or persuade them that life wasn't worth living (something the adults around them will feel sometimes, even if they would prefer not to). So my suggestion is to ask: what is being promoted in the name of happiness? What, if anything, might happiness be a cover story for, and what might its pursuit—in education and elsewhere—distract us from? If education should make you happy, what will have to be sacrificed in its pursuit? We might, for example, want school-age children to have a capacity for happiness, an openness to it, a fearlessness with regard to it, but not an addiction to it. Do we really want our children to think that only a happy life is a good life? How many of the people we admire most from the past were happy? Because if happiness is pursued at all costs, the cost will be too great. It may be best to end up saying something like: education should be showing children good ways of bearing their unhappiness, and good ways of taking their happiness when it comes.
I think, in other words—and perhaps this essay is too blatant an example of this—that happiness is a very difficult thing to be clear about, especially the happiness of children. We don't, for example, want to burden our children with having to be happy because we can't be, and because if they are happy we parents and teachers can feel better about ourselves—casting our children as anti-depressants. And we are all struck by children's capacity for pleasure, how much they can relish being alive, how happy they often seem to be, as we say, by nature. But I think we need to distinguish, as far as we can, most children's innate appetite for life from the adults' need, the adults' demand, that they be happy. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in After Virtue that when people choose to do things according to the utilitarian principle, with a view to promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number, "it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use." The implication is that when people do things to make people happy, they are likely, at best, to be doing many other things as well, and at worst concealing what they are actually doing. Indeed, MacIntyre seems to be suggesting that we should be particularly suspicious of the promoters of happiness; as though happiness is an unusually good word under which to smuggle in a whole lot of other things. As though anyone who thought education should make you happy was really thinking that education should make you a whole lot of other things that sound better if they are called happiness—Coca-Cola promotes "happiness," but actually sells drinks. I don't know whether I am as suspicious as MacIntyre. But I do think we need to ask: if education should make you happy, what is it going to have to make you in order for you to be happy?
This is an edited version of the opening address of a conference at King Alfred's School, London, titled "Should happiness be taught in schools?"
