Time and again, when it boils down to what parents want from school, one key finding emerges: They want their child to be happy. It’s a bittersweet outcome given the hand-wringing and pedagogical knots education gets itself into. If only children were happy… Perhaps the deeper meaning is a desire that children know how to BE happy, learn how to FIND happiness, and understand the role of happiness in having contentment, belonging, and opportunity. But maybe we’ve been framing this the wrong way all this time.
The title and provocation of this post have been bubbling away for a while (as always), but a couple of factors triggered it. The first was how often I had been referring folk to my post about ‘The Four Purposes of Education‘. It really irritates me how often arguments and proposals for education ignore what we know almost any society wants from education: an understanding of purpose in democratic/citizenship roles; an understanding of economic functioning; an understanding of an individual learning agenda; and an understanding of social/cultural contexts. That’s it. Almost all other topics about technology, AI, literacy, numeracy, and others, push towards these purposes as an outcome.
Second, education likes to market grand plans and futures-thinking in how learning needs to change (or not) based on how everything around education is changing. This is most often where the common trope of getting students into career or study pathways comes in. Getting kids into STEM careers is just the ‘factory-model’ by another name. So it occurred to me that if only school could give students a sense of purpose in their OWN lives, then the rest would take care of itself. We have too many young people and adults who look back on their school and tertiary education experiences as often aimless and passive, as if they had no idea what they were meant to be doing, and just settled for being told or shoe-horned into something. The search for purpose and meaning to our lives is lifelong, but we should not waste the first 13 years of learning and have no personal purpose to show for it.
Which circles me back to the opening points about children just being ‘happy’ at school. On the surface, it seems reasonable, aspirational, and emotional. But one day I came across this beautiful quote from writer Leo Rosten –
“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be ‘happy’. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honourable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.” – Leo Rosten (1908-1997)
This quote hits hard. Really hard, if you consider the role of education. Consider also how this quote weaves beautifully into those 4 purposes of education. If children develop an understanding of these areas of functioning and navigating society, then it would be more likely that they would be useful, responsible, honourable and compassionate. But most importantly, they would know how to make their lives count. Which brings the ‘individual’ purpose of education into sharp focus – pursuing learning for the pure satisfaction and passion it brings. This is something that the Arts does so brilliantly, and yet it’s an area that we are gutting and cutting in education at the moment. It’s absolutely disgraceful. Maybe the fact that suicide remains the biggest killer of our young people between the ages of 16-24 should at least tell us something about how education is not giving our kids a purpose in life. Perhaps the purpose of education is to give kids one… at least ONE.
I drew a lot of hope and personal happiness when I read the recent ‘Hope and Resilience‘ report from the Young & Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University. There are so many great insights and reflections from over 1,000 young people in this Report, but I particularly like the finding that many of them just want a ‘beautifully ordinary’ life. It speaks to equal parts purpose and happiness. The tough reality I’m realising we may need to face is that school purpose does not (currently) equal human purpose. Finding a purpose in how we live in the present gives us meaning, connection, and relationships with people and our planet. These seem to be the things we are walking away from, in favour of rigid, predictable teaching and learning – like showing children a slide of a garden but not even letting them experience one outside, because ‘we don’t have time.’
Perhaps when it boils down to it, I’ve often remarked that the real test of a good education is one that leaves the school gates. What our young people see, interact, and experience beyond the school gates should be informed by what the school itself gave them the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values for. If our education gives young people purposes to engage with our world in positive and productive ways, then school will have done its job. It means that our purpose to teach and learn has just become the most essential requirement in society.
