Education and a meaningful life

Abstract

Everyone will agree that education ought to prepare young people to lead a meaningful life, but there are different ways in which this notion can be understood. A religious interpretation has to be distinguished from the secular one on which this paper focuses. Meaningfulness in this non‐religious sense is a necessary condition of a life of well‐being, having to do with the nesting of one's reasons for action within increasingly pervasive structures of activity and attachment. Sometimes a life can seem meaningless when it is not so in fact. In more extreme cases it may in fact be to some extent meaningless.

Equipping young people for a meaningful life is a worthwhile, but not all‐important educational aim. Educators should help them not only to see their lives as meaningful but also to lead lives that are meaningful. This involves continuous engagement in the nesting of reasons mentioned above. Where autonomy is also an aim, temperamental attunement to possible options—rather than exposure to all possible options—and time to explore them are important considerations. Questions arise here both about social justice and about whether current school curriculum and timetabling arrangements help or hinder pupils in living a meaningful life.

Notes

1. By ‘profundity’ here, I have in mind the notion of the absurdity of life and ways of escaping from it associated with existentialist writers like Camus and Sartre and their followers. This is a highly reflective, metaphysical, stance to life that I doubt figures much, if at all, in the more mundane feelings of pointlessness experienced by depressives and others described in this essay. Its notion of meaningfulness seems closer to the religious than to the secular idea of it: a world once full of meaning in this sense is, in these writings, now denuded of it. David Wiggins (1987) has a fascinating discussion of this approach. He sees its weakness as what it has in common with non‐cognitivist ethical theories like prescriptivism and emotivism: the belief that values are in no way derivable from the world but are wholly dependent on our inner states. For Wiggins, on the contrary, the mental and extra‐mental phenomena are ‘“made for one another” so to speak. Compare the way in which the quality by which a thing counts as funny and the mental set that is presupposed to being amused are made for one another’ (pp. 107–108). It is via this route of ‘property‐response pairings’, I believe, that we can make sense of the familiar world of values from those of aesthetic experience of art and nature to those of social service or intimate personal relationships. The fitting reaction to a sense of metaphysical absurdity is not, as Wiggins rightly says, to go in quest of ‘the meaning of life’, as if there were one profound thing in which this resides, but to remind oneself of the multitude of more ordinary activities which can and do fill our lives with intrinsic value and hence make them meaningful in the sense used in this paper.

2. The basic idea for this paper arose from reading remarks about meaningfulness in Joseph Raz's essay ‘The role of well‐being’ (Raz, 2004, pp. 279–281) and his citation of an unpublished DPhil dissertation by Malte Gerhold (2004). I am grateful to both authors for the stimulation their works have provided. More generally, I am much indebted in my paper to Raz's account of well‐being in the article just cited and other works of his, e.g. Raz, 1994.