Many parents’ impromptu answer to those who inquire what they want for their children always has been they want their children to be happy. Therefore, I believe education should be aimed at happiness. The aim of education should be being happy. As I reflected a little longer on this theme, I recalled an essay, “Our Way of Life Makes Us Miserable,” written by Dr. Erich Fromm.

Fromm believes that our society of consumption-happy, fun-loving, jet-traveling people creates anxiety, unhappiness, helplessness and stress, and, eventually, leads to the disintegration of our culture. He declares, “I refuse to identify fun with pleasure, excitement with joy, business with happiness, or the faceless, buck-passing ‘organization man’ with an independent individual.”

Modern industrialism has succeeded in producing an “alienated” man. He is alienated in the sense that his actions and his own forces have become estranged from him; they stand above him and against him, rather than being ruled by him. The means have become the end for him. His life forces have been transformed into things and institutions, and these things and institutions have become idols, which he worships and to which he submits. He is the prisoner of the very economic and political circumstances which he has created.

“Our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucracy in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery,” he states. The oiling is done with higher wages, fringe benefits, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and “human-relations” experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the facts that man does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it. The blue- and white-collar workers have become economic puppets who dance to the tune of automated machines and bureaucratic management.

When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the right mixture of submissiveness and independence. From that moment on they are tested again and again by the psychologists and by their superiors, who judge their behavior, sociability and capacity to get along, etc., their own and of that of their wives. Every society creates a type of “social character” which is needed for its proper functioning. It forms men who “want” to do what they “have” to do.

The worker and employee are anxious because they not only might find themselves out of a job but also are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life. They live and die without ever having confronted the fundamental realties of human existence as emotionally and intellectually productive, authentic and independent human beings.

Those higher up on the social ladder, highly competitive and insecure in some respects, are also more anxious and living emptier lives than their subordinates. To them promotion or falling behind is not a matter of salary so much as it is a matter of self-esteem. This constant need to “prove” that one is as good as or better than one’s fellow-competitor creates constant anxiety and stress, the very causes of unhappiness and psychosomatic illness.

Pointing out rates of alcoholism, suicide, and divorce, as well as juvenile delinquency, gang rule, acts of violence, and indifference to life, Fromm calls them characteristic symptoms of our “pathology of normalcy.” Taking into consideration one’s probable argument that all these pathological phenomena exist because we haven’t yet reached our aim of being an affluent society, he asks, “Yet will we be happier then?” when we eventually produce a materially affluent society.

He notes that Sweden, one of the most prosperous, democratic and peaceful European countries, has one of the highest alcoholism and suicide rates in Europe despite all of its material security. “Could it be that our dream that material welfare per se leads to happiness is just a pipe dream?” asks Fromm.

Certainly the humanist thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who are our ideological ancestors, thought that the goal of life was the full unfolding of a person’s potentialities; what mattered to them was the person who “is” much, not the one who “has” much or “uses” much. For them, economic production was a means to the unfolding of a man, not an end. It seems that today the means have become ends, that “God is dead,” as Nietzsche said in the 19th century, but man is also dead; that it is the organizations, the machines, that are alive; and that man has become their slave rather than serving as their master.

Moreover, Sri Sathyasai Baba has often emphasized that the purpose of education is to instill virtues and character in every individual. “Education is for life, not for mere living. There are scores of people who are not educated in this country and who are still living a good life. Education should enable you to be an ideal example. Education should enable you to distinguish between right and wrong. It should promote humility in you and enable you to serve your parents and your country selflessly.”

He says education must instill the fundamental human values; it must broaden the vision to include the welfare of the entire world. Education must equip man to live happily without making others unhappy, to evaluate everything correctly and without prejudice. Education should combine worldly and spiritual knowledge. Education cannot be confined to stuffing the head. It has to melt the heart as well.

Mandakini Hiremath is a Claflin instructor and coordinator of the university’s writing center.

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