Session Information
13 SES 10 B, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
In the contemporary Western world, there is an obsession with ‘happiness’. Everyone, it seems, is expected to seek happiness and to avoid situations that might lead to unhappiness. Consistent with the wider process of marketisation, happiness has become a commodity: something to be sold, advertised and consumed. Educationists, while often critical of broader social and economic trends, have for the most part accepted the centrality of happiness for human life, and have typically espoused teaching and learning goals and objectives consistent with this view. It is taken as given that education should make us feel better, not worse, and that teachers have a responsibility to prepare students to become happy, well integrated, contributing citizens in their lives beyond schools.
The idea that education is, at least in part, concerned with promoting unhappiness – and perhaps even despair – is very much at odds with the dominant trends of our time. Where students are unhappy, we seek to address this as a ‘problem’ with ‘solutions’ that can range from changing subjects or classes, to acquiring new friends or interests, to counselling, and, increasingly, to drugs. Despair, where it is examined at all, will often be seen as the very anti-thesis of happiness, and education will be regarded as a means to lift us from this profound form of unhappiness to a more desirable state of mind. To say that one is being well educated yet existing in a state of despair would thus seem to be a contradiction in terms. The movement, as it is often depicted, should be from despair to hope – hope for a mode of being, or a set of psychological and behavioural attributes, or a social system where despair no longer figures prominently.
It is possible, however, to see despair, happiness and education in a somewhat different light, and this will be the task of the present paper. I shall argue that despair need not be seen an aberrant state from which we should seek to escape; rather, it is a key element of any well lived human life. Education, I maintain, is meant to create a state of discomfort, and to this extent may also make us unhappy, but is all the more important for that. Contrary to the spirit of our age, this paper suggests that apparent happiness can be dehumanising. I develop this argument via the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, with particular attention to his extraordinarily influential novel, Notes from Underground and his story, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’. My analysis is informed by Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, among other sources. Drawing on the work of these great thinkers, I suggest that education should be seen not as a flight from despair but as a process of deepening our understanding of suffering and its potentially pivotal role in our humanisation. To be educated is, in part, to be aware of one’s despair, accepting of it, and able to work productively with it.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Barrett, W. (1990). Irrational man: A study in existential philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. Cooper, D.E. (1999). Existentialism: A reconstruction, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Dostoevsky, F. (1997). The dream of a ridiculous man. In F. Dostoevsky, The eternal husband and other stories (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.) (296-319). New York: Bantam Books. Dostoevsky, F. (2004). Notes from underground (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York: Everyman’s Library. Flynn, T. (2009). Existentialism: A brief insight. New York: Sterling. Frank, J. (2010). Dostoevsky: A writer in his time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kaufmann, W. (Ed.) (1975). Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Plume. Kierkegaard, S. (1989). The sickness unto death (A. Hannay, Trans.). London: Penguin. Liston, D. (2000). Love and despair in teaching, Educational Theory, 50 (1), 81-102. Marino, G. (Ed.) (2004). Basic writings of existentialism. New York: The Modern Library. McKnight, D. (2004). Kierkegaard and the despair of the aesthetic existence in teaching. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 20(1), 59-80. Nielsen, K. (2006) The negativistic process of education, Nordic Psychology, 58 (3), 183-195. Noddings, N. (2003) Happiness and Education (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Sæverot, H. (2011). Kierkegaard, seduction and existential education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, DOI: 10.1007/s11217-011-9239-6, 1-16. Unamuno, M. de (1972). The tragic sense of life in men and nations (A. Kerrigan, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weil, S. (1997). Gravity and grace (A. Wills, Trans.). Lincoln: Bison Books.
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