By David Rycroft
One of the things my wife rolls her eyes to is when – yet again – I start lecturing everyone within earshot about the two types of happiness. And yet, however many times we have heard about ‘hedonism’ and ‘eudaemonia’, these two types of happiness are relevant when we come to reflect on education. Why? Because one main purpose of education is to set us up for life. And one main purpose of life is to be happy.
So, in case you missed it, the Ancient Greeks referred to the first type of happiness as ‘hedonism’. It’s a happiness, or pleasure, based on the physical senses. The Ancient Greeks called the other type of happiness ‘eudaemonia’. This refers to well-being coming from within the mind. Currently, our society and its education system are implicitly dominated by hedonism, and its belief that we can generate human happiness through the manipulation of – and the consumption of – the outside world. Advocates of eudaemonia, sometimes translated as ‘genuine human flourishing’, suggest that it is only if we also train the mind, and cultivate inner qualities of peace, compassion and wisdom, that we will generate and sustain happiness.
Education: acquiring knowledge
If we look at how we acquire knowledge – which is one of the key principles of education – we can see that there are two main approaches. One approach is the ‘from the outside in’, a perspective championed by modern science. The other approach is ‘from the inside out’, as practised by scholars and yogis in ancient India. Initially, these approaches might seem to be contradictory, but because they have different strengths and because their domains are distinct, these approaches can be used to complement each other.
Outside in
Western civilisation has sought to understand the nature of reality from the outside in. Since the time of Aristotle, we have been seeking neat models to describe reality. Galileo can be described as the founder of modern science, with his quest to see the universe more clearly and explain it with greater accuracy. And Einstein’s beautiful mathematics describe how an ‘independently existing’ universes behaves. The question this ‘outside in’ approach is seeking to answer is ‘What does the universe look like when we’re not looking? Scientists are looking for ‘objectivity’, where all subjective influences from the human side are eliminated. This objectivity is achieved when scientists’ findings are published by reputable publishers, reviewed by their peers and consensus finds that yes, this is how things are. The truth has been captured in a concept, or a series of concepts, that can be commonly understood.
Difficulties emerge with this approach when we start looking at the human mind. The mind is not objective, not physical, not quantifiable, and it’s totally invisible to all methods of scientific enquiry. In order to ‘square this circle’, one solution that scientists have found is to ‘reduce’ the mind to equate it with the brain.
Unfortunately, this conclusion that many scientists have come to, has no evidence. One of the consequences of this conclusion is that knowledge about ‘you’ and ‘I’ are completely absent, apart perhaps from being described as a complex mass of neurons. This ‘unconscious bias’ of valuing the physical over the mental – the objective over the subjective – has filtered through to our education system.
When you have an education system based on ‘outside in’ knowledge, we may be able to produce brilliant scientists who can build fantastic technology, but we are also missing some crucial knowledge about ourselves. This lack of tools to cultivate self awareness and emotional health easily leads to a viral spread of anxiety, depression and a whole host of other toxic states of mind. If and when mental ill-health is diagnosed, the predominant solution given is physical. We are prescribed pharmaceutical drugs which will only ever – in the best case – alleviate the symptoms, without ever addressing the causes.
Inside out
The approach of ancient Indian contemplatives also has its weaknesses. There is very little physics, no science of the brain, no smart phones, no technology and the geography is disputable. In the ‘inside out’ approach, we assume that the mind has a role, because the main type of knowledge we’re interested in is experiential. This knowledge and experience includes how to relate to the thoughts and emotions that arise in the mind, as well as how to cultivate healthy emotions and qualities of mind that lead to sustainable wellbeing for both ourselves and others. The ‘inside out’ approach can also includes insights into the nature of consciousness itself. This knowledge is subjective and, as such, is much more difficult to communicate and evaluate.
In the ancient university of Nalanda in northern India, thousands of students were trained in cultivating wisdom. The central principle was inner knowledge, and their ‘curriculum’ was divided into four main branches – logic, medicine, ‘voice’ (including language and music) and ‘society’ (including the visual arts and engineering). Each of these branches of knowledge manifested from a deep knowledge of ultimate reality, as experienced by teachers having accomplished shamatha and vipashyana meditation. And, in a reciprocal way, students gained a finer understanding of reality through training in these four branches of knowledge.
This ‘inside out’ approach is a very different because it is all about subjective experience, not objective ‘fact’. If we start with a basic question like “what’s the reality of suffering?”, we don’t ask “What’s the reality of suffering when nobody’s experiencing it?” That question does not make sense.
‘Inside out’ education involves questions that are about our lives, about reality that we experience and not a reality existing independently of our experience.
One obvious example of ‘inside out’ pedagogy is the Buddha’s teaching on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. The opening question is something like ‘What’s it like to be embodied?’ What’s it like to look from the inside out? When you observe the body with stable and clear attention, without getting caught in conceptualizations, images or associations, what do you observe?
Radical empiricism
Actually, this approach does share common ground with science. When Galileo was looking through his telescope he was not just conceptualising about planets and stars. He was actually observing very carefully. Galileo started modern science with direct, precise, sophisticated and replicable observation. And that’s very similar to what we do in contemplative practice. We find out about the nature of reality by observing carefully: observing sensations, feelings, thoughts and emotions. We can even practise awareness of awareness, letting the mind ‘simply be’, resting in the clarity and knowing of awareness itself. This is radical empiricism: even if a thousand scientists told us what, according to them, the mind was, we would not even be tempted to buy into their rhetoric and metaphysical assumptions.
What is school for?
Education commentators often remark that students and teachers are obsessed with grades. Grades are indicators of success and are the dominant passport to higher education and, subsequently, better jobs. Schools do their best to assure prospective parents that their establishment is particularly good at educating the ‘whole child’ and that student flourishing is paramount. While it is evident that mental wellbeing is higher up the school agenda than in previous generations, this is sometimes still a tick-box exercise or an area where staff feel ill-equipped to address student needs.
Many schools are left struggling with how to cultivate genuine human flourishing, and some simply ignore the question because addressing the depth of this unknown potential would, simply, be overwhelming.
So what to do? The first step is to educate school teachers in tools for emotional health and mental wellbeing, and also to educate them in how to pass these tools on to their students.
But leaving inner knowledge at the level of student emotional health, while commendable, still indicates a ‘dumbing-down’ and ‘pigeon-holing’ of inner knowledge. It becomes either an optional extra for the privileged few, or it’s reserved for those with an alternative lifestyle, along with a vegan diet and trips to Nepal. If emotional health is left on the margins, the materialists’ status quo has not really been challenged. For schools to be committed to culture-change prioritising eudaemonia whole-heartedly, they need to have firm conviction not only in the resulting benefits but also in the causes and conditions to be put in place.
There is much work to be done in bridging the gap between the daily challenges of running a school and utopian ideals of world peace and a healthy planet. This work involves supporting senior managers, head teachers, school governors and decision makers in their reflections on what schools are really for, and what future we want for society.
When school leaders come to a personal commitment regarding the flourishing of their students, they become powerful agents of change. As these individuals communicate their vision to colleagues, a movement starts growing and pilot projects emerge. Over a year or two, more teachers see the benefits of cultivating ‘inner knowledge’ and perhaps a course is proposed for an entire year group. The gold standard, which is still rare, is to see a ‘whole school approach’, where all staff and students, and many parents, are aware of the schools intentions regarding eudaemonia.
To conclude, the ‘bad news’ is that education habits are very strong, and many teachers are already so overwhelmed with existing work that they often don’t have the mind-space to ‘think outside the box’. The ‘good news’ is that many initiatives promoting ‘inner knowledge’ in education exist, including Teach Peace [teach-peace.org]. These initiatives provide not only a vision of personal and societal flourishing but also a step-by-step path for schools to emerge from old habits and create new cultures where emotional intelligence and social responsibility are the norm.
This article is partly based on a teaching by Alan Wallace, Buddhist scholar and teacher practising in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. A transcript can be found at: https://media.sbinstitute.com/courses/fall2012/06-mindfulness-of-the-body-2/
About the author
David Rycroft is director of Teach Peace. He is also a director of Mind With Heart, an international charity training teachers and students in sustainable wellbeing, emotional health and social connection. David has 20 years experience in training mindfulness instructors and school teachers in tools for emotional health and in sharing these with teenagers. Educated at Eton College and Edinburgh University, he taught art in a London secondary school for ten years before co-founding Mind With Heart. David is also a practising artist.
This article first appeared in EBU Magazine #11 – Buddhism and Education (Autumn 2023). Download the full issue as PDF or browse all issues.