Abstract
It is 2167, the three-hundredth anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s Inaugural Address to the University of St Andrews, and we celebrate a world as a happy place. In every city, tributes are laid at the omnipresent status of John Stuart Mill (‘J.S.’, to the educational elite) and those contributing to the fundamental changes during the first decade of the twenty-first century. This includes Noddings and the Boks, whose work helped us change our views on how higher education might contribute to happiness rather than personal income. A 100 years of happiness pervades all social, cultural and individual activities; there are no longer food and water shortages; efficiency is achieved with mandatory rainbow-belted commissioners who ensure that sigma variances in all things are squeezed into vertical lines; and the popular press struggle to find something unhappy to report in their news. All is well.
THE end of Education is to render the individual, as much as possible, an instrument of happiness, first to himself, and next to other beings.
James Mill 1825
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Notes
- 1.
This has resonance in neo-Confucian writers, as well such as Wang Yang-Ming’s Instructions for a Practical Life.
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Gibbs, P. (2014). Happiness not Salaries: The Decline of Universities and the Emergence of Higher Education. In: Gibbs, P., Barnett, R. (eds) Thinking about Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03254-2_4
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