Education for happiness in a permanently up-to-date manner the concept of Saint Augustine in the perspective of new pedagogical challenges

Abstract

The desire for happiness is one of the greatest human desires. Throughout history, man has searched for happiness in various ways and has found it or not, he wanted to educate himself and others to be happy, to bring out the best in himself and others to be happy. It was so and so it is now, when a person still wants happiness, but more and more often he does not find it and it is strongly related to the deficit of God and excessive consumption, social atomization and mediatization. This is the main research problem of this article. St. Augustine is a very good “pedagogical example” of the long journey he has traveled, a personal “example”, still very relevant, who can teach a modern man a lot and be a very good educator in the process of education to true happiness in the perspective of the illusory “happiness” of modern times. The method used in the article is a biographical method that shows a person well in a specific situation, but is also a school for others, in the case of Augustine a super school of life and victory. The structure of the article is related to Augustine’s transformation process in the perspective of his life.
The conclusions of the research are, above all, an indication of the path of education to happiness, the ways of achieving it, as well as the smaller goals and the greatest goal, which is love and God, as Augustine teaches, whose path, although painful and difficult, ended happily in the end and can be a model to follow.