by Rashed Nabi 22 December 2019
The Happiness Utsav in Delhi’s schools, held in July this year, was a rare occasion for the children to celebrate the gift of their young life. During the two-week festival, the children sang and danced, told stories, and even reflected on the simplest and yet the most intriguing philosophical question of all times: “What makes you happy?” Few school events encourage such spontaneity among children and inspire them to think, “We matter.”
The Utsav marked the one-year anniversary of the introduction of the Happiness Curriculum in Delhi’s government schools. Over this short time, the curriculum has received a great deal of attention from the media and professionals, including in the non-English speaking world. To assess the effectiveness of the curriculum, Brookings Institutions, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy organization, has launched a nine-month project in partnership with the Bangalore-based NGO, Dream a Dream.
What is Happiness Curriculum and why should it be cause for celebration? It is a program for non-scholastic activities designed to teach students life skills and apply the skills to dealing with stressful and conflicting situations. The goal is to improve their mental well-being through developing mindfulness, self-awareness, and critical thinking. The school starts each day with a happiness session. Teachers have received training in child-centred learning to administer age-specific modules of the curriculum for students from nursery/kindergarten to Class Eight.
Drawing on the work of positive psychologists, the curriculum lays out a hierarchy of happiness – much like the hierarchy of needs developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow. At the base of the hierarchy there is “momentary happiness” such as excitement of watching a cricket match. The next level is “deeper happiness” which is derived from affection, such as attachment relationships between child and parent. At the top is “sustainable happiness” which an individual achieves through learning and self-awareness. Reaching this level involves an engaging process, but it has more long-lasting effects on the individual. The implementation of the curriculum is expected to help the students to focus on sustainable happiness.
What justifies the allocation of scarce school resources to this non-scholastic scheme? The context provided in the curriculum is undeniably compelling. Children today are growing up having little connections with social or natural environments. Unguided screen time is further aggravating their alienation. At the same time, many of them are left to confront an array of physical and social stressors, ranging from substandard housing to family violence. Together these environmental factors not only affect children’s mental health but also their abilities to concentrate in school. On top of these, there is constant pressure from parents to perform well in school, the stress of which drives children to their psychological breaking point and even to committing suicide. According to official data, nearly nine thousand Indian students commit suicide every year.
Those stress factors operate largely beyond the school environment and consequently schools cannot play a role in helping students to counter them. By engaging students in happiness activity, the Happiness Curriculum aims to provide them a means to cope with the stress. Acknowledging critical linkages between the school system and the happiness of students, the curriculum asks a very pertinent question: “We as adults have designed educational and school systems for children, but how happy are children with these systems?” Troubled by the same question, Tagore experimented with a new method of schooling in rural Bengal at the start of the last century. Unfortunately, his effort to create an alternative education model has never caught the policy makers’ imagination in India. Neither does the Happiness Curriculum reference it, but at least it critically looks at the ubiquitous problem of the education system which Tagore identified nearly 120 years ago.
Testimonials from students and teachers published in the media suggest that the curriculum has had positive impacts on students, that it has made students cheerful and confident, and that it has improved teacher-student interactions. However, a few random statements are not strong enough evidence to establish the worth of a program that is being administered in more than 1,000 schools. Further, one year is too short a time to demonstrate any sustained impacts of such a large-scale program. One could expect to see a more balanced picture of the impacts when Brookings and Dream a Dream publish the results of their evaluation of the curriculum. Meanwhile, the school administrators could take pride in their effort from the fact that four other states – Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry and Nagaland – have expressed interest in implementing a similar curriculum in their schools. There is no reason why they should not hope for even better outcomes.
The receptiveness of students and teachers to the curriculum may also be attributed to several improvements to the Delhi’s schools, which are the envy of other states. One of them is the renewal of school infrastructure that has promoted safe and healthy learning environment. The government schools now have cleaner classrooms, cleaner toilets, quality desks, computer labs, and better equipped gyms and playgrounds. Some model schools have swimming pools which even private schools cannot afford to build. None of these would have been possible had the Delhi government not made education a priority and allocated an unprecedented 26% of its total budget to education. Arguably, the better physical environment has supported the teaching and learning of happiness.
Another change that has contributed to the favourable learning environment is the revamping of the school-level management committee. Three-quarters of the members of the committee are represented by parents and selected through an election process. With a majority in the committee, parents can put their children’s interest and well-being first. Unlike before, the school management committee now has access to a budget and can play a role in day-to-day management issues. Additionally, they can communicate more complex issues to the top-level administration through a social media network. This parents-led committee has increased the accountability of the school system and provided more supportive environment to undertake extra-curricular activities.
But one fundamental thing has not changed yet, that is, the workload of students. Indian students still go to school six days a week and come back home every day with a heavy load for homework. This burden is even heavier for the one-day weekends. Those students rarely get a chance to relax. They would no doubt only have positive comments on the Happiness Curriculum and the Happiness Utsav, seeing it as a welcome break from their demanding routine. .
The Happiness Curriculum is a step in the right direction to acknowledge the needs of Indian students. The next step for the school administrators would be to start thinking about fundamental reforms that have potential to transform schooling from what Tagore called an education factory to a place where children will enjoy learning.