In Jill Belli’s article, Why Well-Being, Why Now: Tracing an Alternate Genealogy of Emotion Towards Composition, she talks about how higher education can lead to a shift in students’ emotions. Jill goes on to talk about PERMA, a construct that positive psychologists view as well-being. PERMA stands for positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment and is what many believe to be the different components or categories we see well-being as. Accomplishments tend to lean more into the educational side of things. This could be completing assignments or achieving the highest score on an exam you’ve studied so hard for. All of these are huge accomplishments that are all tied strongly to the education system. 

       Belli states, “is closely tied to mastery, success, and the controversial notion of grit.” This makes me begin to ask the question of how does this relate to our intrinsic and extrinsic factors? Intrinsic factors are doing things for your pleasure while extrinsic being doing things to avoid punishment. Belli argues that if we lack accomplishment and motivation, then this may disrupt our emotions. You may ask yourself: how do we feel when we accomplish things intrinsically versus when we accomplish extrinsically motivating things? You’d tend to feel better about yourself when you complete something for your own doing. It almost feels like a sense of joy and being proud of yourself whereas completing something extrinsically may make you feel relieved that it’s over, not necessarily proud of yourself. This then ties into how we feel when we can complete those assignments. Do we really feel good about an assignment we’ve done due to being extrinsically motivated or is it just a sigh of relief? 

One way to cultivate joy and pride is by cultivating a moral obligation. Belli goes on to state that, “ Advocates of positive education position it is a ‘moral obligation’, treating it as unquestionably positive development and a goal that we, as educators and human beings, should all share.” While reading over this quote, it’s crucial to understand the message behind it. This quote is stating that everyone must share the same goals in life and everyone must have the same emotions. However, what would the world look like if that were the case? Would we all be programmed to think the same things? There wouldn’t be much diversity in human life if this were the case. We may not all share the same goals in life and yours may be different from the person next to you. IPEN, or known as The International Positive Education Network, is striving to make the education system better by trying to include teachings about happiness and well-being. They state “...we believe that the DNA of education is a double helix with intertwined strands of equal importance: academics; character and well-being” and over the past decade, it’s brought interest in connections between education and well-being; it has shown that these two things together have become increasingly visible. 

Now take a minute to reflect on your education system. How does it benefit you? Are they teaching you the things you’ll use in life or are they teaching you things you will probably never need to know again in your life? Schools don’t teach based on your needs, they teach based on their curriculum and it does not prepare us for real-world problems. Jill Belli goes on to further state, “ students are underprepared, teachers are underqualified...the educational system is failing.” This struck me as a surprising part. Thinking about how the education system is treating the students involved in it. How underqualified are the teachers and should there be more that teachers need to prove to be hired? In my eyes, it’s crucial for a teacher or professor to be able to understand the emotions some students may have and be more mindful of what a student may be going through. The education system values those who put in more time and more effort and become top of their class and those who don’t get left behind in the dust. But those that get left behind may have tried their absolute hardest, but teachers may never know because they don’t know what’s going on emotionally in the students’ minds. 

Some would argue that well-being does not have a place being taught in schools and higher education and others would disagree. However, teaching well-being in schools can be a very important part of the curriculum. If students don’t learn how to properly take care of themselves emotionally, then how would you expect them to thrive and be able to accomplish their bigger goals later on in life? You wouldn’t. Students need to be helped emotionally and need to have those people that they can go to for support or be able to rely on. This way students won’t feel as much pressure on them. Belli states, “ In its current application, positive education runs the risk of becoming a form of ‘ banking education, instrumentally filling students with positive affect (i.e., making them personally happy so they can be economically and socially useful)...” Here she is speaking about how positive education is currently shaping the students involved in it. Positive education is not a bad thing, it’s more used to help students be able to later thrive in their lives and to better understand how their emotions reflect on their work. 

In the long run, we can see that it may not be such a horrible idea for the education system to add well-being as a part of the curriculum. In the eyes of a college student, I wish that this was something taught to me while I was still in high school. Having someone there to teach you more about time management and how to use your emotions to make your assignments more intrinsically motivated rather than worrying about the extrinsic factors. Having that person there to guide you through your emotions and teach us about what it means when you’re starting to feel a certain way. I believe this should be added into the education system as it’ll hopefully help younger students do better in their classes but also help teachers and professors better understand the type of work a student is putting into their assignments and how that can reflect on their true emotions that some may not show to others. So I ask you this, how are you?