But I'm not entirely sure how successful they're going to be in teaching "happiness lessons" to ennui-overloaded middle schoolers. Not that I think it can't be done; just that I'm not terribly hopeful they'll have the sound philosophy and guts to do it properly. To give happiness lessons, you first have to know what happiness is, and our culture has such a degraded, vitiated, weak notion of happiness (compared to, say, the Church's notion of beatitude, or Aristotle's eudaimonia) that even the word "happiness" sounds trivial, banal, inane, and pathetic, a fact which the editor was able to exploit in the headline to give the article more comedy value.
Think about it. They're probably not going to do it through Christianity or even any semblance of religion at all. That means you're limited to purely natural means. That means, basically, teaching them a mechanism to cope with the unavoidable proposition "life sucks, then you die." There have been many such systems devised, or rather many iterations of a few basic ideas (I consider that the really meaningful way to distinguish between philosophies is by what they consider to be the highest good). (P.S. I was thinking, but forgot to imply, that they theoretically could also just attempt to condition them to maintain an "unexamined life" in a way convenient to their superiors.) Which one do you think they'll pick?
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