Care, Forgiveness and Happiness

I always believe that “care” and “forgiveness” are the precious values that contribute to our exploration of happiness. To me, “caring” and “forgiving” mean “giving”. As long as you decided to give and were willing to give, you would feel that you have done something for others unconditionally, and you feel happy about it. To make a stronger stance, I wish to add some more scholastic arguments for the importance of students’ exploration of “care” and “forgiveness” and the need for moral education curriculum to include an effective approach that helps students to explore these values. More scholastic arguments will also be provided to show how important students’ concept of happiness is, how “care” and “forgiveness” are related to happiness, and whether school curriculum today, especially moral education curriculum, promotes happiness.
Gilligan (1982) proposed a concept of care as a complex of six virtues or behavioral dispositions: acquaintance, mindfulness, moral imagining, solidarity, tolerance and self-care. Gregory (2000) described democracy in term of two divergent but compatible sets of practices: social non-interference social co-operation. His behavioral analyses of Gilligan’s concept of care and his concept of democracy led him to conclude that “certain behavioral habits that partially constitute a person’s or a community’s caring also partially constitute that person’s or community’s democracy. Specifically, the caring virtues of acquaintance, mindfulness, moral imagining and self-care also belong to the virtue of democratic co-operation, and the caring virtue of tolerance constitutes the democratic ideal of non-interference.” He continued to argue that since most of the virtues of care are also virtues of democracy, they should be appropriate aims of public education, and that the enculturation of caring and democratic virtues requires that children practise the kind of inquiry in which these ideals are constructed.
The recognition of the importance of “forgiveness” is increasing in psychological and educational fields. The research on the experience of offering forgiveness to others and receiving forgiveness so far suggests positive the outcomes. These effects are explored from psychological, social and moral perspectives. Consider Fitzgibbons (1986) and Hope (1987) had similar observation that forgiveness is powerful in freeing people from their anger and from the guilt which is often a result of unconscious anger. In a carefully controlled experimental design, Huang (1990) found that those with a high level of forgiveness were significantly lower in both blood pressure and levels of negative emotion. Al-Mabuk (1990) showed significant correlations between forgiveness and the following variables: lower levels of psychological depression, lower levels of anxiety, and higher levels of self-esteem. Gentilone & Regidor's (1986) reported that there has even been a demonstration on the group level that forgiveness can benefit communities, not just individuals. However, those in a just and merciful community could explore distinctions between the equality of justice and the equality implied in forgiveness. There are considerable differences between the two. For example, “the point of justice is to restore equality where inequality exists. In forgiveness, the offended person does not restore equality. Instead, in forgiveness the offended, relative to the offender, recognizes that the equality of their commonly shared humanity existed before, during, and after the hurtful event. Thus we do not restore what was never taken away--our humanity, our basic worth. Forgiveness helps us recognize that such equality has existed unconditionally and will continue to exist regardless of one person's behavior towards another.” “It is true that a forgiver may take steps to help self and others and recognize this unfailing equality, but restoration is not implied in such behavior. It is also true that a forgiver's steps in this way may restore a friendship, but the equality of the two (their worth as human beings) would exist whether they reunited or not.” In sum, the equality human beings struggle for in justice concerns how they treat one another, while the equality seen in forgiving others concerns who they are regardless of how others treat them. These distinctions may cause students to seek justice differently and with different motives. Moral education programs may take into consideration the following points. First, it is recommended that short-term moral education programs which are focused on one particular virtue such as care or forgiveness be explored, for these virtues can be supported by short term intervention. Some studies have shown that the practice of a particular virtue may be realized with short term interventions in spite of the fact that some forms of moral education may require substantial time, such as moral stage-re-structuring from a Kohlbergian paradigm. Second, although there would be good presentation of “what forgiveness is and is not” by educators and numerous philosophical arguments for and against forgiveness, giving students chances and allowing them to formulate his or her own position through discussions and argumentations with given rich contexts may help students in the process of choosing to embrace or reject forgiveness.
In addition to the supporting attitudes towards values, students’ concept of happiness is very important, for it affects their attitudes towards community, family, schools, teachers, friends and study. It also determines their behaviors and guides their actions. What constitutes students’ happiness has become the focus of a number of studies in happiness field. Maltby, Day and Barber (2005) believed that caring means giving, including giving forgiveness and found that there is a relationship between forgiveness and happiness. This relationship may vary depending on one’s concept of happiness. Thus, helping students to explore “forgiveness” may be related to helping them to construct their own concept of happiness. The question at this point is whether school curriculum, especially moral education, concerns about this matter. There have been a large number of international debates on the focus of school curricula today. Many conclusions have been made on their narrow aim. Social scientists, researchers, and educationalists claim that school curricula today only focus on preparing students for work or financial success and neglect preparing them for personal life (Noddings, 2003). Therefore, many advanced education systems fail to enable their students to identify their happiness, the most important thing in life. It is time the educationalists should look into the aims of education as its fullest meaning – yielding happiness and improve school curricula, especially moral education curriculum which is believed to aim at helping students to explore and construct life values and forming their life concepts – key components of happiness, in both contents and teaching approaches to make teaching and learning a dialogic, affective and influencing process and learning as ecstatic experience.