[The happiness classes, Sisodia said, are part of that larger effort. Under the program, 100,000 Delhi students spend the first half-hour of each school day without opening a textbook, learning instead through inspirational stories and activities, as well as meditation exercises.]
By Vidhi Doshi
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A teacher guides students
through the first day of happiness classes at Rajkiya
Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, a senior secondary
school for girls, in
Delhi on July 13. (Mansi
Midha for The Washington Post)
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NEW
DELHI — After the summer break,
Delhi’s children returned to school this month and found a new class added to
their schedules: happiness.
It wasn’t a welcome-back joke. In a country
where top universities demand average test scores above 98 percent and where
cheating on high school final exams is organized by a “mafia” that includes
teachers and school officials, the Delhi government’s initiative marks a shift
of emphasis from student performance to well-being.
“We have given best-of-the-best talent to the
world,” Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s education minister, told a stadium full of
Delhi teachers attending the launch of the happiness curriculum. “We have given
best-of-the-best professionals to industry. We have been successful so far. But
have we been able to deliver best-of-the-best human beings to society, to the
nation?”
Sisodia’s happiness classes represent a radical
experiment in a country known for its rigid, bookish education system, which
has helped cement a new middle class over the past three decades but is also
criticized for encouraging rote learning and triggering high stress levels.
Many blame it for a rash of student suicides.
The son of a schoolteacher, the minister is
known for his unorthodox policies, including promoting public over private
education. His Aam Aadmi Party — founded in the aftermath of a grass-roots
anti-corruption movement in 2011 — has ramped up spending on Delhi’s government
schools. Education accounts for 26 percent of the city’s 2018 budget, allowing
educators to push a raft of new ideas, such as special classes for children who
are falling behind and parent-teacher meetings.
The changes have paid off — Delhi’s public
schools have outperformed private schools on standardized exams in recent
years, although one expert said that the overall numbers are skewed because
private school students tend to choose more-difficult math and science subjects
while public school children pick humanities.
The happiness classes, Sisodia said, are part
of that larger effort. Under the program, 100,000 Delhi students spend the
first half-hour of each school day without opening a textbook, learning instead
through inspirational stories and activities, as well as meditation exercises.
Children appeared enthusiastic when schools
reopened this month . “We should work happily,” said 11-year-old Aayush Jha, a
seventh-grader fresh out of his first happiness class at the Government Co-Ed
Senior Secondary School in Chilla Village, in east Delhi. “When you work sadly,
your work will not be good.”
Math teacher Sonu Gupta told his class of
eighth-graders about what physicist Stephen Hawking had achieved despite his
neurodegenerative disease. Upstairs, Santosh Bhatnagar, who teaches Sanskrit,
told a class of seventh-graders to close their eyes and imagine doing something
that made them happy.
The students asked questions and nodded along.
“I learned that you should learn to have faith in yourself and that those who
try never fail,” said Dipanshu Kumar, a 12-year-old in Gupta’s class.
Some teachers, though, remain unconvinced. For one
thing, they say, the public schools are too crowded for a curriculum based so
heavily on classroom interaction.
“If we have 80 students in our class, how can
we keep track of every kid in just 35 minutes?” said Bharti Dabas, who teaches
English in a government school.
Others doubt that the happiness classes can
change the culturally entrenched emphasis on exams and memorization. Geeta
Gandhi Kingdon, chair of education, economics and international development at
University College London, who also teaches at a private school in Lucknow,
India, said that there haven’t been any studies to assess their workability.
“Anecdotally, I know in some schools they are
just another box-ticking exercise,” she said. “Teachers have not really bought
into it.”
Sisodia’s initiative comes after nearly three
decades of rapid industrialization in India. To meet the demand for skilled
labor in the country’s profitable new industries, successive governments
churned out high school and university graduates — but allowed standards to
fall. Some states made exams easier and marked them leniently so students could
boast of high grades to universities. In 2009, a previous national government
introduced a no-fail policy through the Right to Education Act, which led to
classrooms full of teenagers advancing through school without being able to
read or write.
Now many, including Sisodia, are asking whether
the focus on employability has stifled creativity and stymied social progress.
“If a person is going through our education
system for 18 years of his life and is becoming an engineer or a civil servant,
but is still throwing litter on the ground or engaging in corruption, then can
we really say that the education system is working?” he asked one recent
morning at his home.
Sisodia’s enthusiasm for happiness classes is
inspired by India’s tiny, cheerier next-door neighbor, Bhutan, which in the
early 1970s pioneered a new index — “gross national happiness” — to measure its
development, as an alternative to the widely used gross domestic product
indicator.
In 2009, Bhutan introduced a
“happiness-infused” curriculum, which caught the attention of policymakers and
government ministers at a time when the world was reeling from the financial
crisis and reexamining the values of modern capitalism, said Alejandro Adler,
director of international education at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Positive Psychology Center.
Since then, at least 12 countries, including
Peru and Mexico, have experimented with similar classes in schools.
