Happiness Curriculum in the National Capital

HELLO READERS!

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Literary education is of no value if it is not able to build up a sound character. ” This resonates a lot in today’s world. The definition of satisfaction and happiness has taken the brunt of this. Today, happiness means being able to afford luxury and satisfaction has been limited to a paycheck. The youngsters spend almost two decades of their life in school. Even though the education system is able to make many of them successful in terms of employment, not all are successful in terms of contentment.

Happiness is the greatest human expression. It can be said that the ultimate aim of humans is to achieve happiness. Happiness is an emotion of joy, gladness, satisfaction, and well-being. It is a feeling of being self aware, sensitive and mature. People who are high on these abilities are far more successful and content in their life than those who are low on them.

The Delhi Government has launched a new initiative: Happiness Curriculum. This curriculum has been introduced to over 1,000 Delhi Government schools between nursery and class 8. The students will have a happiness period which will be of 45 minutes. The curriculum helps the students to explore happiness in relationships, by becoming self aware and through participation in different activities. The purely activity based curriculum doesn’t have any formal examinations. However, a periodic assessment of children’s progress would be made using happiness index.

According to the World Happiness Report 2019, India ranks 140th among 156 most to least happy countries of the world. This poses a significant challenge in front of the Indian society and families, and also compels us to rethink the purpose of education as merely improving the student’s scholastic performance.

To battle this, the curriculum is aimed at creating self awareness and to stimulate good mental health, character and resilience. It is also set to improve cognitive abilities of the students and reduce anxiety, depression and intolerance amongst the young minds. Lastly, Happiness Curriculum also aims at helping the students to face social problems and finds solutions to them.

This initiative by the government is set to reduce the societal and parental pressure faced by the students to achieve the best in their academic and personal life. Although this is just a humble beginning of the reform in traditional education system in Delhi, it is being hoped that this effort would blossom in other areas of the country as well.

-AUTHOR: VANSHIKA KUMAR (I-YEAR)

– RESEARCH BY: ARADHYA SHARMA (I-YEAR)