In this smart and eloquent book, Noddings argues that happiness should be taken seriously as one of education’s aims. She argues that our society presently seems to have an economic view of education: people go to school in order to go to college and people go to college in order to get better jobs (and make more money). But what about happiness?
Noddings first considers happiness from various historical and philosophical viewpoints, then considers ways in which education might bring us greater happiness. She argues that since personal life is such a source of happiness (or unhappiness), schools should address it more than they do now; she considers various methods of doing so. Her discussions of what it means to make a home, and how the topic of home might be discussed in school, are particularly interesting, as are her discussions of space and place. She suggests, for example, that students could read an excerpt of Proust, probably the famous madeleines scene, and then use that reading as a prompt for thinking and talking and writing about home and memory and the senses and how all those things intertwine. She suggests that we can learn about people (fictional characters, ourselves) by attempting close-readings of the spaces that they live in and move through. These kinds of classroom discussions have the potential to be incredibly interesting and engaging, more like what happens in a college classroom (or a particularly good high school’s English classes) than the stereotype of useless plot summary or tedious memorization of things like the difference between dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter.
(Also exciting: this book’s long and fascinating bibliography.)
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