Designing for ‘Happiness Curriculum’ and India

A few weeks into 2018 and on my way to Dharamshala, I found this flipping through a newsletter on Delhi Airport.

I wondered what’s triggering this initiative — politics/local event(a kid was murdered in a school by another kid) or just a good cause.
But apart from that, did you know world happiness report states — key variables that have been found to support well-being are income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.

There is certainly more to Happiness, but at least we know on what factors is happiness index is calculated.

‘How can evidence from the science of well-being be used to improve the science and practice of policy making? To answer this question requires an understanding of both why and how an emphasis on happiness changes the policy making process. There are three main answers to the question of how the practice of policy making changes when subjective well-being becomes the focus of attention. The first involves a fundamental change in the methods used to compare the results of alternative policies. Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, using happiness as an overarching policy objective has the potential for building cross-government cooperation. Narrower objectives of government departments may be subsumed when greater happiness is the encompassing goal. This in turn may aid the achievement of a wider sense of common purpose. Third, once happiness is established as the overall goal for policy, it is possible and natural to improve the policy making process in fundamental ways. It will now become important to consider not just the happiness of the recipients of government service but also the impact of the services on the happiness of those designing and delivering them, and those living in the surrounding communities.’ — Global Happiness Policy Report 2018

Coming to creating a curriculum for Happiness. NYU holds this course called The Science of Happiness and students from all majors are able to participate in arguably one of NYU’s most popular classes, through the “Core Curriculum.” This one teaches about the true science behind happiness and similar emotions in our lives. Here is the syllabus for it.

Getting back to my tour, although Dharamshala was a recreational one, we found that 33rd Mind & Life Dialogue was happening in Dharamshala and was chaired by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
I quickly googled and decided to be present in the next session which was about attention training and meta awareness in education research.
This session was moderated by Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds.
Phones were not allowed but you can see details and pictures of the event here.

It was there where I first heard about satipatthana sutta, the Great Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness. Thupten Jinpa was presenting how one has to observe ongoing processes within one’s own body and mind. He also talked about Santideva, 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and elaborated on his guidance of how mindfulness guards your subconscious creating a door at the entrance of your thoughts and simultaneously altering your perception formation.

It was in this talk that I learnt about Theory of behaviour change.

Using all, I gave a thought and attempted how a basic framework could look like for primary students in India.

I walked along established grounds accepting that happiness is feeling and can only be imbibed as habit(staying happy) if learnt continuously as a part of the curriculum for several years. In fact, in all school years as a part of core curriculum.

I took a span of 10 years. And divided learning in eight attributes, those I learnt from the above mentioned session.

Knowledge — Attraction — Attention — Enthusiasm — Effort — Action — Joy — Habit

Knowledge: Nursery to Class II
Create a foundation to understand what constitute happiness: a journey from abstract feeling to relatable other words. Teach function of happiness- what is peace, harmony, trust, tolerance, freedom.

Attraction: Nursery to Class II
Generating Attraction towards learning what constitute happiness. To create enough awareness through music, dance and games for a student to get attracted towards fundamental of happiness (Healthy living )

Attention: Class III to Class V
Subconscious effect of attraction is attention. Attraction towards a certain subjects leads to student paying attention towards it. Help them create a subconscious gate of what they absorb from their surrounding.

Enthusiasm: Class III to Class V
Attention if properly harnessed has the power of creation of enthusiasm in the students. This enthusiasm is required for activating the realm of self awareness in students- being aware of their emotions, feeling and how to avoid traps which pushes students into inferiority complexes. Bring awareness about uniqueness and concept of recognising oneself as no lessor then other.

Effort: Class III to Class V
Utilising an already gained attention and enthusiasm to make students learn techniques of wellbeing. Putting effort in building an understanding self awareness. Making them aware of dealing with expectation from parents, friends, and society in general. And how it should be dealt without affecting their wellbeing. For Eg. recognising what constitutes peer pressure and how students take action under its influence.

Action: Class VI to Class VIII
This is the phase where students actually take actions coz of an already put effort. They recognising emotions and feeling as part of ones whole being. Here we provide a structure for students to step by step deploy the techniques of well being. Students should be put in process of breaking the stereotypes associated with them. For eg. recognising that crying =weak, only girls cry is a stereotype.

Joy: Class VI to Class VIII
Enable students to remain in the state of happiness. Making them aware of other side of the coin i.e. sadness, depression. Disassociation of weakness / inferiority / myths / superstition as an associative of depression/sadness. Imparting ability to students to build support structure –friends & family and removing the inhibition of seeking help when needed.

Habit: Class VI to Class VIII
To achieve “Happiness” being a default for the students, requires small incremental changes in action and behaviour of students towards an identified action area.

This is humble start to a structure around Happiness curriculum. Any one who would like to build up/ iterate/ ponder more on this structure, please do write to me at work.with.shiva@gmail.com. I would love to hear views and possibly make a tangible tool to do just the same. Providing aid to learning Happiness.

You might want to check the tangible tool that I built for Ideation called as Design Think.

Have a good day. Keep learning.