The Pursuit Of Happiness In Education

In a certain sense, happiness is purely individual in that one's own subjective happiness is directly accessible to him/her but not that of the others. It might be for this individual characteristic of happiness that people tend to judge happiness in self-reference. If one believes material well-being is happiness itself, wealthy people will be the happiest in his/her opinion; whereas if one believes idleness is happiness, people who are painstaking is indeed the least happy persons in the world. But is what we believe to be happiness real happiness? Actually, people cannot estimate at all to what extent what "I" believe is a perspective of my own as an independent being or just something that "I" was taught, which had started in fact ever since one began one's education.Yes, no matter education shows itself in whatever forms, it always carries with it some understanding of happiness, for happiness itself is one of the pursuits of education. That is why we try to define happiness all the time in education. And the definition of course is inevitably in the self-reference of our own as the educators with the result of the disappearance of the educatees who are supposed to be happy. We claim that education is for the happiness of the students, yet what is heard is only the voice of our own: "Happiness should be like this. Happiness should be like that." Yet, it is indeed students themselves who really understand what happiness sure is. So this study intends to shift from the perspectives of educators to that of the students, which does not mean of course the abandon of the ideas of the educators but serves as an effort to make the submerged voice of the students to be heard. Therefore, the approaches of sociocybernetics and subjective well-being in psychology are used here to view students as self-organized psychological systems, so that a comprehensive and impersonal description of students' state and concept of happiness and the gaps between them is made via questionnaires and interviews, and a social and culture analysis on the problems in education reflected provided. The whole study consists of four parts, the content of which is introduced hereinafter.Part I is a brief introduction of the research background and questions. Chapter 1 discusses the significance of education in the pursuit of happiness and summarizes the studies on happiness in pedagogy, ethnics, economics and psychology. Chapter 2 points out the problems existing in the studies on happiness in education in the academic world, and puts forward the main questions that will be discussed in this research while briefly explaining the choice of subjects and expatiating on the theoretic and methodological significance of studying happiness in education in a sociocybernetic approach.Part II comes the quantitative study of the research. In Chapter 3, the dialectic relationship between education and happiness is discussed. That is, education falls into the different kinds of means in the pursuit of happiness, so it points to happiness yet may lead to illusory happiness by any possibility for the nature of happiness pyramid. Therefore, the ultimate aim of education is believed in this research to point to the happiness of human being while ensuring individual happiness in the process as happiness is a unity of process and reality. Based on the domestic studies on the subjective well-being of teenagers, the scale of Model Senior High School Third-Year Students Subjective Well-being was developed in Chapter 4, while the state of students' subjective well-being reported and influence factors discussed. Here we find study pressure has little effects on students' subjective well-being, whereas companionship, self satisfaction and meaning in life on the contrary have more distinct positive effects. And the analysis of the questionnaires shows that the state of students' subjective well-being is a little bit lower than the middle level and gender and school differences are obvious.In order to have a deeper understanding of the results shown in the quantitative study, qualitative study is used in Part III. Chapter 5 analyzes students' concept and reality of happiness in depth based on student interview (including some teachers and parents). It is found that students at large have not developed positive and relatively steady self-consciousness so as to be happy in dependence and rely much in their understanding of self, life and the world on the input of external environments. School education, however, does not constitute an important input system of students' concept of happiness. Chapter 6 compares the curriculums of two sample schools in the hope of finding out if school culture is the factor affecting students' subjective well-being. However, we did not find any difference in the self-control and interests of the students from the two schools since neither of them has jumped out of the traditional thought of studying for the tests. And that indeed makes no difference in the school cultures of the both. The school differences of students' subjective well-being, therefore, are basically from the different status of the two schools in their respective district. Chapter 7 focuses on the gender differences of students' subjective well-being and finds that it is the stereotype in gender that results in the lower score of male students in their subjective well-being. That means the different expectation and reaction from family, school and society to both sex have been accepted by the teenagers as a relatively stable "happiness pictures for different sexes", which has virtually intensified the behavioral differences in both sex and caused different experiences in their subjective well-being.Findings of the study are summarized in Part IV. A brief summary of the findings from both quantitative and qualitative studies is made in Chapter 8, and inspirations of the study are revealed as in the following: (1) School has to develop a cooperation based on the mechanism of balance & control and equal participation so as to create a continuous and thus effective educational environment for the students, if it is going to be an important input system of the students' concept of happiness. (2) To help students develop positive and relatively steady self-consciousness, school education has to change its traditional understanding of study and emphasize the aspect of students as active and positive learners while respecting their study interests. (3) Cognition cannot take the place of emotional experiences. Happiness needs an experience of certain scope, depth and frequency which cannot be taught just in the class.