Human happiness cannot be created as a side-effect of success. You cannot get balanced, peaceful and happy adults by pursuing mechanical/academic success as the goal of education.
Mind patterns are set in childhood and are affected by mass culture which is affected by education, predominantly. Since, the focus of all education has been on becoming successful at the cost of neglecting training in development of peace and inner happiness, people are driven towards a rat race to earn success.
Training young minds to think that working mechanically for successful performance is all that is needed to be happy makes them feel comfortable about ignoring complex emotional development , which actually aids human mind towards evolving to be happy and healthy through the obstacles which adult life projects.
Children driven towards winning above being peaceful, start finding short-cuts to success which are manipulative and corrupt. A pattern of mass thinking has developed such that respect is measured by money. If you are not aiming at happiness or inner peace, money for success can be earned by being manipulative and corrupt more than by being good and helpful.
However, happiness and satisfaction come from a job well done whether it is acknowledged as successful conventionally, or not. Winning always is not necessary to be happy. Trial and error are common processes involved in research and inventions. Through the process of overcoming failure, happiness and satisfaction continue to motivate the person towards achieving success with satisfaction. For example, Thomas Edison continued to fail for thirty years before he finally created an electric bulb. Like him, students need to be trained to be motivated from within by a system of education which rewards the process of achieving satisfaction and not just the result.
A balanced training between inner satisfaction and outcome/ happiness vs. success ensures internal and external satisfaction even if the money earned is less than conventionally well defined. But, a pure focus on results/money/success leads to neglect of effort on feeling satisfaction, peacefulness or freedom from anxiety
The need to never be peaceful is conditioned as a habit of thinking during schooling years, due to the stress on external good performance above inner peace. Children are judged as being good or bad by external measures of success like school grades which later are replaced in adults by external measures of success like cars, clothes or jewels.
However, getting good grades or performing well in sports or dance or music or art or earning good money in adult life does not lead to contentment in adult life. Children, always motivated to perform for pleasing society’s norms of success, cannot, naturally, focus on inner contentment.
To create contentment in adulthood, instead of just focusing on good external performance, mind patterns which focus on development of happiness and inner peace of mind have to be inculcated by redefining the education curriculum.
Negative thinking predominates mass thinking in today’s world because people are not taught how to be peaceful in schools. This repeated pattern of negative thinking can be solved only by adding spiritual awareness to the concept of success; wherein development of peacefulness and compassion in children is as much awarded as good performance.
Children trained into being peaceful would make peaceful adults and create a peaceful world whereas restless children who are constantly asked to perform for success, make anxious adults and a restless world, which is prone to anger and violence.
A basic training in emotional management and the ability to create optimism with awareness ; are necessary to overcome all problems with a positive attitude and live a comfortable life; with the inner self being more in peace than being violent or angry.
If a connection to the subconscious mind and training in being peaceful are cultivated from childhood, escapism into depression or anger would not be the most natural route available to adults if marriages break down or finances collapse. Peace and emotional satisfaction will automatically rise in society and replace conflicts, anxiety and unrest.
The need for maintaining good health, optimism and contentment would spread as being as important as needs of education once a spiritual understanding of happiness is integrated along with being monetarily and mechanically successful in the education system.
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