The art of being personally happy and publicly useful

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/09/2024 (734 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Democracies are in trouble around the world — maybe nowhere more than in the U.S. However, Canadian and European democracies are also being challenged by the rise of personal attacks, outright lies, conspiracy theories and divisive hate speech, along with voter disengagement.

As disturbing and, ultimately, just as destructive, is the outright attack on public education. Both are cause for concern and a wake-up call for citizen attention and intervention.

Ursula Franklin, world renowned physicist, philosopher and educator, known for her ability to capture complex ideas in concise terms, referred to the purposes of education as helping children become “personally happy and publicly useful.”

We might call this education for democracy, or education with democracy in mind and it’s a good place to start.

Most of us acknowledge that there are no proven prescriptions for either personal happiness or public usefulness, and even less agreement on what they mean. A good place to start is to think together about education and democracy.

For its part, education is a continuous re-thinking and ongoing reconstruction of understanding and meaning making. No one is ever really educated in that they’ve learned all they need to know about changing circumstances and contexts.

When it comes to how to respond to life’s changes, there’s no recipe for success — one always starts with no guaranteed end in sight (education has no end point).

This makes education a very personal journey about how to be a good person living a good life in an ever-changing world while allowing everybody, in their own never-ending process, to strive for and create their own notion of living well. Complicating matters more, our concepts of education are also defined by culture, tradition and history — what we have in common with others.

For its part, democracy is as indefinable as education — in addition to being a governance system of laws, structural arrangements, procedures and practices, it’s also a way of life.

While we may decry our governments’ actions on our behalf, it is the way of life, the way of conducting ourselves every day, which I believe is at the roots of our discontents and should be a bigger concern.

Moreover, both education and democracy as ideals are driven by our sense of what it means to be truly human — the first is that we all get to have a say in what they mean, how to pursue them and make judgments regarding our success. Educated citizens all claim a right to create and re-create our own notions of each while appreciating the right of others to do the same. Both democracy and education require an active ethical imagination, which requires us to respect the perspectives of others.

The second is that they are both dependent on our notions of happiness, freedom, responsibility and authority. Aristotle believed that humans could be neither happy nor free unless they were involved in something greater than themselves. The authority, or right to engage others, rested in assuming joint responsibility for themselves, all others and for their city, Athens. In our case, this would mean the health and well-being of our communities and political jurisdictions as well as their respective institutions.

The third is that we educate our young and ourselves continuously for both, seizing the opportunities provided for us to either learn more or to act on behalf of others. I find it helpful to think about where they differ and, whereas I see both as a shared responsibility, I see democracy as largely an adult-adult project. I see education as primarily a children and young person undertaking guided by adult authority.

In other words, children are not born democratic — adults have to teach them the character dispositions and practices of respectful dialogue; the obligations and sacrifices of living in harmony with others; and the skills and critical imaginations to help others also envision and achieve their own notions of the good life and citizenship.

Adults teach by example — both as models of attitudes and behaviours — but also as exemplars about when to exercise individual sovereignty and when to defer to other sources of authority. Today, many adults both in government and in public life are failing miserably, seemingly with reckless abandon driven by personal ambition.

We do not want our next generation to live and experience the hostility, incivility and insecurity which currently marks our governments and public spaces. What are we to do?

I believe the best tool we have at our disposal to assist parents in raising democratic citizens who will participate in and uphold democracy consists of public schools, although there is no question that it is virtually impossible to educate children without the help and support of parents, relatives, local communities, civil society organizations and governments. Nevertheless, we risk compromising our children’s chances at democracy when we fail to support our public schools with gratitude and respect and corresponding financial support in keeping with their mandate.

Our public schools at their best represent what we want for our young and ourselves — how they do foreshadow the strength of our democracy. They emphasize acceptance of others, personal excellence, inclusion and equality (mirroring the hallmarks of democracy).

They emphasize the development of self-governing individuals who grant others what they wish for themselves. They aim at personal achievement and public obligation, democracy’s mix.

A friendly reminder — although there are no guarantees, the road to preserving and fostering our democracy is by placing, as our public schools do, our foremost focus on the way we conduct ourselves everyday in the presence of others. A new school year just begun is a great time to reflect on these matters!

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.