Dr. Ha Vinh Tho on reimagining, cultivating, and practicing happiness

As told to Isabel Flower

The concept of Gross National Happiness started in the 1970s. The third king of Bhutan had just passed away and his young son, who was only seventeen at the time, was supposed to ascend the throne. Back then, Bhutan was still an absolute monarchy, and the future king realized he did not really know how he should govern. He very wisely decided to travel around the country and talk to the people. He spent almost two years simply listening to the citizens of Bhutan.

When he got back, he sat with his advisers to share what he had learned and figure out what the priorities of his government should be. He came to the conclusion that, of course, people want many different things— young and old, women and men, city dwellers and farmers, and so on. But the common denominator is that everybody wants to be happy and to avoid suffering. So, he decided to put happiness and wellbeing at the heart of his government’s mission.

It was a beautiful idea, but it was still very vague. How do you actually implement that on a government level? He was aware of what was happening in neighboring countries; Nepal and India, for example, were modernizing quickly and he observed the price they were paying for so-called “development” in terms of ecology, society, culture, and so on. The idea is that Gross National Happiness (GNH) is more important than Gross National Product (GNP); economic growth, development, and modernization are just means—they are not the goal in and of themselves. Rather, the goal is to improve the happiness and wellbeing of all Bhutan’s people (and of its life forms, because, in a Buddhist country, happiness is not only about people, but also about the animals, plants, air, rivers, mountains, forests, and so on). That was the starting point for the GNH index—the rubric that every decision that’s made and every project that’s implemented should be analyzed from the point of view of its impact on happiness and wellbeing for all. Naturally, this shift very much changed the way the new king and his government went about organizing the country. In most other countries, decisions are weighed against financial outcome and rarely calculate the impact on society, people, and the planet.

“I belong to the generation of what you (in the US) call the Vietnam war, and what we (in Vietnam) called the American war. It’s a difference in perspective.”

There are two main components that influenced my own path into doing this work. One has to do with my Vietnamese roots. My father was Vietnamese and my mother was French. I belong to the generation of what you (in the US) call the Vietnam War, and what we (in Vietnam) called the American War. It’s a difference in perspective.

When I returned to Vietnam in the early 1980s, five or six years after the war ended, I witnessed how much destruction there had been—ecological, infrastructural, cultural, social. I had already been working in the fields of education and special education. We started the Eurasia Learning Institute for Happiness and Wellbeing with very small, targeted programs for the children who had been victims of the war on many different levels—children who have been traumatized, handicapped, etc.

The second component of my path is that I was the Program Director of the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan for a number of years. I realized that what I had learned there was not only useful or valid in Bhutan, but also in other developing countries, and actually even more so in the so-called “developed” world.

You cannot look at education as if it is separate from the rest of society. Education is actually a mirror of society at large. In order to tackle overall systemic and structural problems, you have to start with your education system. The goal of the Eurasia Learning Institute is to implement a variety of educational projects that are inspired by GNH and, therefore, to put happiness and wellbeing at the center of all human actions. And, again, not only human happiness, but the happiness of all life forms.

“You cannot look at education as if it is separate from the rest of society. Education is actually a mirror of society at large. In order to tackle overall systemic and structural problems, you have to start with your education system.”

The Eurasia Learning Institute focuses on three areas. One is business; we work with corporations who are willing to transform their protocols according to the framework of GNH. Another is politics; we work with local and city governments, including in Switzerland and Germany, to place GNH at the center of their policy considerations. And, most importantly, we work in education via two main initiatives. The first is through the development of yearlong postgraduate programs for people who want to become GNH practitioners; the second is through bringing GNH training into schools.

Our first attempt was in Bhutan, together with the Ministry of Education. It was a collaboration between the Eurasia Learning Institute and The Mind & Life Institute, which is based in the US and brings together scientists and contemplative practitioners, especially Buddhist thinkers under the patronage of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That program, A Call to Care, was focused on bringing a care mindset into the school system. From there, we developed our current main program, which is called Happy Schools. Before I tell you more, let me clarify what I mean by happiness, because when we speak about happiness in the context of GNH, it’s important to understand that what we’re speaking about is not just a superficial feel-good mood. We’re really asking ourselves: “what are the enabling conditions and conducive environments for people to have a meaningful life?” That is the key to genuine happiness.

We have conducted a lot of research to confirm that happiness is linked to three key care connections. The first connection is with oneself. The emphasis of school is usually directing attention outside the self. Students learn academic skills and subjects such as math, language, and history. These are, of course, important. But what if a person, especially a child, is not in touch with their inner self and their emotional dimensions? We know that it takes many years to develop intellectual skills, but the same is true for emotional skills. How do you learn to deal with difficult emotions? How do you learn to cultivate consciously positive emotions? These things are not taught in school and, as a result, we have a lot of burn out, a lot of bullying, and a lot of distress that we don’t address in a meaningful way. Another element of this first module focuses on teacher training, because if teachers don’t know how to take care of themselves, how can they impart that to their students? We must also empower teachers to be aware of their own inner emotional life and to develop mindfulness skills that make it possible to handle difficult situations in a more balanced way. We don’t force our teachers to follow readymade curriculums, either. Instead, we train them to use care to find creative ways to be attentive to age, cultural context, and social context.

“The emphasis of school is usually directing attention outside the self. Students learn academic skills and subjects such as math, language, and history. These are, of course, important. But what if a person, especially a child, is not in touch with their inner self and their emotional dimensions?”

The second connection is care for others, because one of the most important factors in happiness and wellbeing is the quality of human relationships. Whether through friends, family, community, or religion—it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship necessarily—it is crucial that every person feels well integrated and has strong, trustful, and loving bonds with others. Again, this is not consciously developed in school. On the contrary, school is much more about competition that pits students against one another at the cost of collaboration, solidarity, compassion, and empathy. Care for others prioritizes core qualities of the heart such as compassion, gratitude, and kindness.

The third connection—and one that has become so important in our time because of climate change and other ecological challenges—is care for the environment. This is not about learning facts and figures about biology, or about becoming fearful and desperate. It’s about a true and deep connection with nature. Clearly, the knowledge that we need to change our behavior is not enough, because we have known what we needed to do since the early 1970s. Fifty years later, we have barely changed anything.I believe that is in part because we are missing a heart connection with the natural world—an existential connection with animals and plants.

When there’s a balance between these three modes of care, a person is much more likely to feel connected to their true being, aligned with their values, and in tune with the world around them. Happy Schools use a variety of tools and programs to achieve this. For example, our Design for Change program empowers children and young people to make practical contributions to their communities that provide a sense of purpose and agency. It’s important that no one start their life feeling desperate or powerless. That leads to despair, cynicism, or worse. Entrusting children with very practical projects such as planting trees, overseeing a garden, collecting rubbish, and so on, has proven to be very helpful in giving children the feeling that they can create change.

This pedagogical approach was developed by an Indian woman named Kiran Bir Sethi and her methodology teaches several things at the same time. It teaches design thinking, democratic participation processes, and strategies for taking concrete action through a four-step process—1) Feel: what is bothering us that we want to change 2) Imagine: solutions to solve the problem 3) Do: find practical ways to implement your ideas 4) Share: communicate to scale up the impact.

First, the children decide what they want to change or what is disturbing them, then they brainstorm different solutions among themselves, then they create a way to execute that solution together. A group of children at one school in Bhutan decided that they no longer wanted to bring packaged food for lunch because they recognized that the waste being produced was hurting the environment. They decided to stop bringing packaged food to school, except for one day a week, because balance is important and it’s natural that, once in a while, one would still like to have chips or some kind of packaged snack. On all the other days, they brought things that they had prepared at home and that were packaged in reusable containers. On the one day per week that they were allowed to bring packaged food, which was Wednesday, they collected the leftover packaging and used it for a variety of handicrafts. For example, they transformed bits of cut up plastic into the filling for little cushions.

This initiative started in one class and was then implemented in the rest of the school. It was so successful that they started sharing it with other schools. Eventually, the founding class appeared on national television as guests in a special program with the Ministry of Education. Hundreds of schools all over the country adopted their project. These kids were nine or ten years old. One might think, “What can a ten year old do to protect the environment?” But the purpose of Design for Change is to demonstrate that even if children don’t have direct decision power, they can still come up with great ideas.

That’s one of the aspects of the Happy Schools that touched me the most, even though I’ve been involved in pedagogy for forty-five years. My PhD is in education. I’ve worked in this field all my life, in a variety of forms. I’ve always been interested in alternative pedagogical models, such as Waldorf, Steiner, Montessori, and Green Schools, for example. These small-scale pilot projects are important because you can really try out new things. However, the majority of kids are still in the public system, especially those who are less privileged. Some parents, often the upper-middle and upper class, are able to enroll their kids in private schools or commit more resources to their education. I’m happy for them, of course, but this doesn’t solve the problems of the majority of the kids whose parents are not necessarily aware of pedagogical issues and might not have the financial means to pay for private school.

Happy Schools is a project that can be implemented in any public school. Our goal was to create a program that would be understandable and applicable anywhere, not just in elite or private environments. In Bhutan, this was relatively easy because GNH is already the guiding philosophy and the Ministry of Education was very supportive. But when we started working in Vietnam, it was different, because Vietnam is still a communist country. The education system is very centralized and everybody has to follow the same national curriculum. At first, we were not at all sure how we’d be able to do it.

Now, we usually have as many as 100 teachers in each session of Happy Schools training. In these past few years, it’s been incredibly moving to witness the impact our approach has had on teachers, students, and the families of the students. Many people have given testimonies about how Happy Schools have changed their lives. Recently, we hosted a focus group with fifty former students of two of the first teachers to bring our program to Switzerland. There was an absolute consensus among the students that small exercises made a significant difference in their learning experience. For example, teachers started adding what is called a “quality class time moment” immediately before the lesson starts, in which each student simply expresses whatever they are feeling that day. Although the teachers didn’t make any major changes to the full curriculum, these small adjustments catalyzed tremendous shifts in the interpersonal atmosphere of the class.

In the US, there is a parallel movement around social and emotional learning called CASEL. There are actually quite a lot of mindfulness education programs around, but the challenge is finding the people who are creating networks and the teachers who are brave enough to try something new. You can start in a very small way. All you need to do is find one, or two, or three educators who believe that mindfulness could make a difference in their life and in the lives of their students. I think this is increasingly urgent, especially as I observe the level of social division happening in the US. One of the core skills of Happy Schools is listening. When people can’t dialogue with one another, that’s when violence begins. Violence doesn’t begin with a fight, it begins with a closed mind and heart. If kids simply learn to listen, and listen deeply, that could change culture.

Dr. Ha Vinh Tho is the founder of the Eurasia Learning Institute for Happiness and Well- being‚ former Director of the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan‚ and former Director of Learning and Development at the International Committee of the Red Cross.