Human development: happiness as a motivation

File Photo, Daniel Mallard

Gaston Marcotte, special collaboration

Saturday, February 17, 2018 05:00

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Saturday, February 17, 2018 05:00

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The abandonment of the compulsory school before graduation is a matter of concern to parents, teachers and politicians. As an educator, I believe that the problem is not a lack of perseverance on the part of young people. This is why I propose a solution that attacks the root cause of many problems of the compulsory education including that of perseverance rather than its effects-recurring.

Aspiration for happiness

Human beings are biologically an end in itself, thus to themselves their absolute value. They all naturally to live a happy life here and now. They have sought relentlessly to reduce their misery and their pain and increase their pleasure and their joy of living. This innate aspiration to happiness has been, and continues to be the main engine of progress in all areas of their activities. Each new generation therefore has a natural and inalienable right to an education in happiness suitable for all age categories.

To comply with this law, it is necessary that education should be based on science and an art, trans-disciplinary human development. This holistic approach to personal and raise the interest of young people toward school and the content of its programs, a fundamental condition of their perseverance. Without which, the discourse of education in the integral development of the student will continue to be pure hoax.

Subjugation of the school

Let’s put the things clear. Compulsory education has never been of human happiness-its reason for being. In fact, the most important public institution, has always been subject to the various powers competing for its control. Religions, political ideologies, industries, professions and the trade unions have always sought to place education at the service of their particular interests at the expense of the new generations and the common good. Devoid of a aim of education based on a conception of natural, rational and scientific, and therefore universal, the common nature of human beings, the school will continue to be in crisis despite all the reforms of which it is the object.

A be learning

Young people are naturally curious. They want to touch everything, see everything, know everything and do everything. They never stop. In addition, their mode of learning excellence is not memorization, but the imitation and experience. This is not motivating for young people full of energy and curiosity to be confined to a room for learning materials for which we have not been able to create interest. We are not taught to connect what they learn to their own development and to their happiness. Is it then any surprise that 75 % of young people bored at school ? For a child, getting bored is the worst of things, while built-in activities that interest him, he is capable of a perseverance surprising.

Montaigne (1533-1592) warned us that it was necessary to aim for the head well made rather than well filled. In fact, compulsory education should have as a social function to help the members of each new generation to become more human, always more. However, to successfully meet the most important challenge humanity faces, it must teach young people to know and especially to develop the more possible each of the major dimensions of their being (physical, intellectual, emotional, sexual, moral, etc) that they have inherited in potential at birth.

When the school will be centred on the actualization of human potentialities in children and adolescents and on the satisfaction of their natural aspiration to want to live a happy life here and now, I believe that staying in school will no longer be a major problem.

A preventive approach by excellence

Respect the inalienable right to an education in happiness is, for me, the preventive approach par excellence as it is rational, moral, scientific and economic. Do not respect the most fundamental of human rights is, according to me, the first crime against humanity, as all other that arise directly or indirectly. This crime is all the more inexcusable that humans possess currently sufficient expert knowledge, educational institutions, money and technologies to develop and disseminate to the greatness of the planet of the education programs at happiness.

Gaston Marcotte is an associate professor at the Faculty of education sciences of the Université Laval and founding president of the Movement Humanization.