Should contentment be a key aim in higher education?

Abstract

IntroductionThe notion that education is the provision of intellectual and emotional desire satisfaction has tended to become a driver of university strategy, reflecting how institutionalised education (in some, but by no means all cases) has been interpreted in this consumerist epoch. Roberts (2013) writes that education now seems actually to be about promoting desire satisfaction, often in ways that are not implicit for education but that create Should Satisfaction Be a Higher Educative Aim? The case for contentment pleasurable and measurable experiences. It is this shift of emphasis from the nature of edification which might be pleasurable to where the edifying experiences are required to be pleasures is s significant change in educational policy. Moreover, the effects of this change is compounded as what is taken as pleasurable is that which satisfies certain desired attributes of the input processes of being educated not in the more ontologically difficult notion of learning as becoming . These inputs and the level of their satisfactory delivery prove conducive to be measured and measured they must to justify the returns on the investment made in them both by the students and others in the education process. The value for money imperative has led to the fetish of unquestioned metrics which prompts simple comparisons of the complex that lead to the invasion of pedagogical policy and practice.Satisfaction metrixs are used to build reputation, inform educational policy and create conformity. Moreover, they represent an agenda for desire satisfaction that is an extravagant, imagined sea of opportunity (favoured by advocates of education as a means to an end through accreditation which increases social capital through levels of employment)and not one where a tempering of achievement is obtained through balancing capabilities and potentiality. Indeed, the current context of education seems to emphasise anxiety of failure in getting right job and income and thus fear and dissonance for one's decisions about one's future. This paper considers higher education from an alternative perceptive of contentment and tries to develop a clarity between that and happiness and desire satisfaction. Such clarity is needed as the terms are often conflated leading to confusion in practice. I seek to do this by reference to Heidegger and especially to his distinction between emotions (in my terms;happiness, joy) which are brief and transitory and moods (contentment, anxiety0 which are fundamental and reveal the world to use. These of course intermingle but are distinctive in their temporal relevance. The notion of happiness, satisfaction contentmentThe etymology of the terms shows a closeness and interrelationship between all three terms being contented, satisfied and happy. Indeed it seems that the dominate term is happiness for it can act as meaning giving in a number of ways. Indeed the literature often uses happiness as a prefix to discussing desire satisfaction and contentment. however in this paper I want to deliberately hold...

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