Happiness and religious education

Richard Layard (Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. 200-201) argues that school systems should include a class that teaches people skills essential for happiness as part of each year’s curriculum:

• Understanding and managing your feelings (including anger and rivalry)
• Loving and serving others (including practical exercises and learning about role models)
• The appreciation of beauty
• Causes and cures of illness, including mental illness, drugs and alcohol
• Love, family, and parenting
• Work and money
• Understanding the media and preserving your own values
• Understanding others and how to socialize
• Philosophical and religious ideas

Those subjects outline what in many respects constitutes the goals of good religious education, i.e., learning to love self, others, and God. Too much religious education achieves little beyond a basic familiarization with some Bible stories and appears to have no over-arching goals. The question of what clergy, parents, and others hope that religious education will achieve is admittedly difficult but essential for a religious education program to achieve much. (NB: Religious education is not for children only. An adult religious education program should build on essential lessons learned in childhood.)

Layard’s enumeration of essential life skills not surprisingly reflects the essential elements of the human spirit: ability to love and be loved; creativity or imagination; aesthetic sense; self-transcendence or self-awareness; autonomy; and capacity for language.