The Double-Edged Sword of Happiness

Abstract

In this paper, I critically investigate happiness as desirable affect and as educational goal. More specifically, I problematize happiness as an emotional practice -- by teachers on behalf of their students -- in social justice education. Following Sara Ahmed, I argue that happiness is a complex intersubjectively-constructed affect, rather than a simple intrasubjective feeling. This more complicated framing of happiness enables us to see that fostering happiness can be progressive and empowering, but it can also be regressive and unjust. Happiness cuts both ways. Social justice education considers how society and schooling normally function in ways that maintain inequitable status quos, questioning how students are treated as different from or the same as one another, and critically responding to problematic power relations in educational contexts. My analysis first enumerates two theoretical perspectives that endorse happiness in education: the educational philosophy of Nel Noddings and the influential paradigm of positive psychology (Seligman). Both are generally well-known to teachers. I then use the work of Ahmed, among others, to illustrate ways in which calls for happiness can function to serve unjust relations in education. Ahmed’s theorizing of the cultural politics of emotion (2004) is especially helpful here. By highlighting happiness as an intersubjective and power-laden affect, as opposed to an intrasubjective feeling, I make clear the complicated role happiness – as affect and goal -- plays in life generally, and in the work of teachers specifically. Taking up Ahmed’s focused commentary on happiness (2010) enables me to demonstrate the implications of critical and relational theories of emotion and happiness in the educational realm. That educators should strive to cultivate classrooms that are not spaces that encourage or promote needless suffering, as Noddings has argued, makes good sense. Similarly, that happiness is beneficial to people instrumentally and therefore is worth promoting in education is not in every case problematic. Thus there is a reasonable space for practicing and promoting happiness in education. Yet allowing space for unhappiness is also merited when considering education as functioning for social justice. That happiness can be used in communities as a tool to maintain a status quo that does not intrinsically aid the cultivation of all members’ happiness equally should give educators pause before possibly tracking students’ feelings, as if they are individual and unrelated to the larger contexts of the classroom, home, and society. Furthermore, social justice education that aims to enhance equity and inclusion in society must face social challenges. 'Bad feelings' that come up should not be a hurdle to teaching such curricula. Discomfort accompanies witnessing social problems. Happiness cannot be sought in a vacuum apart from other, more mixed emotions, as part of character education. Happiness must not be demanded or educated full stop—but alongside unhappiness and other experiences, to promote greater social justice through education. In the end, I suggest that educators who want to foster social justice in educational settings need to accept that happiness – as affect and goal – is a double-edged sword with both potential positive and potential negative consequences.