Varieties of Human Experience

            In this blog and the next two blogs I want to focus on three kinds of experience (i.e pleasurable, engaging, meaningful) that researchers in the field of Positive Psychology say that human beings generally seek. Each of these experiences is important for a Joyful Education.  The topic of these experiences is taken up in more detail in my forthcoming book, Renewing the Sacred.  This blog will briefly present thoughts on pleasurable experiences. 

In the teacher’s consciousness the child has been sent to the telescope to look at the stars, in the child’s consciousness he has been given free access to the glory of the heavens.

Alfred North Whitehead: The Aims of Education

           In children of my grandchildren’s age ( four and three) pleasurable experiences, engaging experiences, and meaningful experiences are very much the same thing. Often adults close off or get closed off from the second and third tier of experience, as our lives become smaller and more concretely factual and, therefore, harder to change. That is partly because many adults have lost the child's sense of wonderment and awe. This difference in consciousness between child and adult is brilliantly captured by Whitehead in the quote above. What a difference between looking at stars and perceiving the glory of the heavens? How much more engaging and meaningful is this experience? How much more pleasurable? Small children are always engaged, time flows for them in that state that can only be called the eternal present, and they are ever involved in meaningful learning activities and thus are full of pleasure. So they laugh a great deal.
          As we grow older, these three types of experience can get separated out into the hierarchy of stages that I just listed, but that is because we have enough “negative” or painful experiences to know that there is a real and not just a momentary difference. But also as one moves up the ladder of these stages nothing essential is lost. I mean that there is little chance of engagement without it also being pleasurable and there is no meaning without real engagement, because meaningfulness is created: it is not usually given or manufactured from thin air. Thus all the elements become consciously reintegrated into one experience, so that, an engaging experience is also pleasurable, and a meaningful one is often, but not always, both pleasurable and engaging. More to come on this in the next posts.
          By pleasurable experiences I mean all the usual pleasures we understand--i.e. not only sensory pleasures, but also the pleasures we associate with words like fun, amusement, relaxation and the distractions provided by an omnipresent entertainment industry. But the “happiness” experienced with amusements and entertainment ends when the amusement ends. So if our lives have no enduring real pleasures we seek more of these immediate pleasures. There are diminishing returns with seeking such pleasures. All thrills diminish over time because it takes more to get the same result. Psychologists call this merry-go-round the “hedonic treadmill” and addiction of some sort is often the unhappy outcome. Thus the search for happiness is, at this level, really fueled by great unhappiness. This stems from confusing “feeling good” with being happy. But the pursuit of happiness is really to hide one’s unhappiness--signers of the Declaration of Independence take note. Aristotle said: “A virtuous life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement.”
          School is, often, a frustrating and joyless place where students are to do what they are told and have few ways and opportunities to participate in decisions that affect their lives or to fully use their talents. There is little pleasure in the classroom, whatever may be happening in other parts of school and at other times of the school day. Teachers often try to counteract this situation by making lessons fun—meaning amusing or recreational. Whatever short-term benefits reside in this approach, and there are some, in the long-run this is a mistake. The mistake is not in the attempt to make learning fun, which is laudable, but in thinking that fun is enough to turn the tide.
          To say that learning should be pleasurable is not to confuse education with entertainment. The difference is this: good education, like good art, should change you in some way. It should leave you with something you did not have before the encounter. It should improve you, provoke you, stir you up or confound you, enlarge your mind and heart in some way. It should bring forth what is inherent in the spirit, not deprive you of it. But it cannot leave you unchanged. Entertainment does not pretend to change, though great change could be the result. But I mean that the intent of entertainment is not to change you, but to amuse you, to relax and divert the mind for a time.
          Thus, good education is not about getting a little humor into the classroom—though the more of that the better. Children do not need more entertainment. Children and youth do not long for amusement, for they are sated by it. If they long for anything it is to shake off the lethargy that society imposes upon them to keep them docile and passive. Passivity is bred into them. Passivity distorts human nature and thought. It is only when the original nature is subverted by false programs of development that the result is distorted and abnormal. It is this terrible environment that fuels the search for pleasure as a kind of opiate to dull the pain of the inauthentic life.
          What good teachers do is make lessons engaging and meaningful. There are strategies to accomplish this that I will share next post. Share some of your ideas before the next post.