Major non-governmental organizations such as the OECD and UNESCO as well as official state policies increase mentioning of happiness in their publications. The former developed a ‘Better Life Index’ that seeks to make wellbeing measurable (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/), the latter offers a framework called ‘Happy Schools’ for wellbeing in South East Asia. In 2013, the OECD published first comprehensive guidelines and covered three main areas: life evaluation, affect, and eudemonia (OECD 2013). Especially the latter deserves attention coming from an educational point of view – diverse concepts of happiness, welfare and the like have been connected to educational ideas early on, beginning with Aristoteles’ reflections (MacIntyre 2007; Feldman 2012; Schott 2019). In times of digitalization and converging education policies (Lawn & Grek 2012), several policy papers and reports (e.g. OECD 2017, UNESCO 2016) seem to stick to this tradition. In this regard, it makes sense to reconsider historical ideas of how happiness has been related to educational actions. In a recent 2019 publication, the OECD asks “How’s life in the Digital Age?” In our paper we aim at examining the underlying concepts of happiness in digitalized education and connect them with historical precedents. This historical perspective is the context in which we evaluate our findings. Is happiness something that is regarded as an explicit educational goal or as basic requirement for learning and self-formation? What is e.g. the purpose of the introduction of the school subject “happiness” in Switzerland? Why are notions of satisfaction and well-being becoming more prevalent in today’s higher education system (Elwick & Cannizzaro 2017)? Is the recurrence of concepts of happiness something that serves as a defense mechanism against increasing performance pressure and accelerated, digitalized working conditions or is it just the rediscovery of value-based education models? What can we learn from historical relations between education and happiness for future education endeavors?

With the help of close reading of selected, impactful curriculum documents in the context of digitalization of education and schools we aim at drawing connections between contemporary and historical notions of happiness and the respective role of education therein based on school curricula and those of universities subject to the availability. Thus, our approach is hermeneutic in a classical sense. For a more precise analysis, we make use of the so-called 5-S-method that stems from lean manufacturing and Japanese philosophy of production. In parts of philosophy, it is an established way of analyzing any type of text. The 5 ‘S’ are: 1) sort, 2) set in order, 3) shine, 4) standardize, 5) sustain (cf. https://www.philosophie.phil.uni-erlangen.de/qualitaet/arbeitsmittel/Arbeitsmittel1_Textanalyse.pdf). This method gives us a useful template for sorting texts that were written with different purposes, e.g. curricula, teaching announcements, research papers etc.

Our preliminary findings indicate three main trajectories. Firstly, there seem to be powerful normative ideas of what constitutes 'happiness' at play (Bucher 2001; Schott 2019; Vogel 2013). Secondly, happiness education presents itself as a brand new phenomenon worldwide, although historical studies show that there have been concepts of the link between happiness and education since at least ancient times. Thirdly, digitalization may affect both aforementioned trajectories. What happiness is in digital times seems to shift in relation to practices of digitalization itself, e.g. in proposing 'digital detox' or affirmative stances. Secondly, happiness in digital times is, that is our take, not fundamentally different from pre-digital pedagogical endeavors. Our comparisons so far show that there is a high degree of likeness between modern concepts of happiness in schools (as subjects, as definite aim of schooling, as part of the curriculum etc.) and historical concepts thereof. All in all, there are a lot of questions that persist even after our analysis. These are for example: What can we learn from historical relations between education and happiness for future educational endeavors? Can there be valuable input taken from ancient education and implemented into modern education? What should be considered, where is a disconnect between old and new? Looking at each context of the educational concepts, it becomes clear that there are highly different frames of reference for each materialized idea of happiness. At the example of stoicism, today we can hardly use handbooks or manuals how to become happy with complete disregard of social conditions.

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