Thanks for the comment. Glad that part resonated. Plenty of heaviness all around. Got to be true to ourselves!

I'm not sure I've ever heard the pursuit of happiness parsed to mean education before.   I always equate it to the right to own property. 

That's interesting. I never thought of it that way, but I think I understand it. For mine, it comes down to personal growth leading to happiness. That's it in a nutshell. The longer version could certainly consider growth leading to acquiring property that allows free time to pursue happiness.

There's some debate on the matter, but I tend to side with the camp that believes Jefferson was alluding to Locke's three pillars of a free society: Life, liberty, and property.  Whether the change in verbiage is purely artistic and semantic, or substantive is up for discussion, and there is certainly a lot of room for nuance.  There is definitely no right to happiness, and one can argue that even in the pursuit of happiness, there's a distinction between trivial pleasures and true, significant contentment with the endeavor of building a life.  Even preferring the simpler, more pragmatic interpretation as I do, the word property refers to something more significant than merely owning something.  As a landed peasant, the property interpretation is one of the reasons I strongly oppose property tax on real estate, especially real estate used as part of the means of production by individuals and partnerships.  I don't believe in corporate personhood, so the taxing of strictly commercial property owned by incorporated entities is something I'm not necessarily opposed to, but now I'm wandering off topic a bit.

I like that you wandered. I recall the Locke comparison, now that you mention it.

For myself, I'm an advocate of and believe in the longevity of the pursuit of happiness. I also sincerely wonder in the reasoning of those who think Jefferson was offering up the pursuit of simpler pleasures over, as you said it, "true, significant, contentment".

The most important thing to remember, at least for me, is that the promises of the declaration are not entitlements to anything except for freedom from interference with those things on the part of other men or governments.  Locke's similar text talks about how we should not harm another person's life, health, property, etc., and act to preserve mankind.  It isn't exactly socialist philosophy, but it's also not entirely incompatible with democratic socialism, either.  I fall very heavily in a libertarian to an-cap philosophy personally, but I temper that very heavily with pragmatism when I apply it to real-world politics.