Unless you’ve been in silent retreat for
the past several years, you know that the “mindfulness revolution”
sweeping the country is now playing out in the public sphere. The
schools are no exception, and not everyone is happy about it: Is
mindfulness an educational tool, teaching skills that make kids more
attentive and emotionally balanced? Or is it a religious
practice—Buddhism in secular clothing—violating the Constitution’s
separation of church and state? Is it a universally beneficial practice,
or are its proponents introducing a cultural bias when they bring the
practice to underserved schools? Weighing in are Dr. Candy Gunther
Brown, Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University,
Bloomington, and Dr. Saki Santorelli, Executive Director of the Center
for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University
of Massachusetts Medical School.
NO—with its roots in religious tradition, teaching mindfulness in public schools violates the separation of church and state.
Wouldn’t every schoolchild and teacher be better off if they had
the tools of mindfulness meditation? To those who have experienced the
benefits of mindfulness, the answer to this question may seem an obvious
“Yes!”
Such confidence in the practice of mindfulness meditation, however,
can create an ethical blind spot that ignores its religious content, as
well as the context of its implementation. Although it is not uncommon
for proponents of mindfulness to assert, in certain contexts, that
mindfulness is purely secular, it is also common for them, in other
contexts and particularly among fellow Buddhists, to declare that
mindfulness embodies the essence of buddhadharma—a case of
wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too. Certain leading proponents
envision “secular” mindfulness as “stealth Buddhism,” a “skillful
means,” or a “Trojan horse” for mainstreaming the dharma.
When it comes to bringing mindfulness meditation into public
schools, this can create a problem. Children and their parents
expect—and laws require—public schools to offer secular education that
is neutral toward particular religions and religion in general. There
are reasons for this limitation. Public schools serve children, parents,
and teachers from diverse cultural backgrounds, many of whom already
have deeply cherished religious traditions and spiritual resources that
they find effective.
The fact that the majority of public school mindfulness programs
are supported and administered by upper- and upper-middle-class
Buddhists of European descent, yet target lower- and working-class
minority populations, only adds to this problem. These minority
communities, mainly African American and Latino, are statistically more
religiously active than the non-Hispanic, white American populations who
generally run mindful school programs.
At worst, such programs can inadvertently participate in a cultural
imperialism that not only condescends to racial and ethnic others, who
are seen as having unenlightened religious and cultural practices, but
also puts undue responsibility on children for ameliorating symptoms of
systemic social problems such as poverty and racism, which are glossed
as cultural pathologies. Insofar as these programs reinforce the hope
that we can tackle systemic problems with small, low-cost,
philanthropy-funded programs that modify the behavior of the
disadvantaged, they can even make things worse.
It’s painfully obvious to most observers that the American public
education system needs something that will better address rampant
challenges afflicting so-called urban schools, such as low achievement,
stress, obesity, drugs, and violence, and mindfulness seems an easy fix.
Mindfulness could potentially boost test scores and facilitate focused
attention, emotional self-regulation, and classroom management.
But it might also constitute both a religious and a cultural
encroachment. The fact that there exist secular benefits to mindfulness
does not make the practice secular. Abundant scientific research
demonstrates that religion and spirituality promote physical and mental
health and learning. Studies of prayer, for example, report benefits
similar to those of mindfulness. But we wouldn’t integrate prayer into a
public school curriculum. In the end, appeals to science can’t simply
speak religion away.
Yet mindfulness proponents attempt to do just that, declaring the “secularity” of mindfulness without defining the terms religion or secularity
or explaining how mindfulness has been secularized. Alleging that
mindfulness is a “nonsectarian,” “universal” human capacity—to simply
“wake up” and “see things as they really are”—justifies upholding one
culturally particular worldview as superior to others. This not only
smacks of cultural arrogance; it is precisely a religious attitude—a claim to special insight into the cause and solution for the ultimate problems that plague humanity.
None of this is meant to argue against offering optional
mindfulness training for public school children or teachers—for
instance, as an after-school program, if advertised clearly and
consented to by children and their parents with knowledge of all it
entails. But integrating mindfulness as a formal part of the public
school day is a different matter.
Instructors—both mindfulness trainers and public school
teachers—occupy authoritative social positions that command students’
respect and trust. The context of classroom instruction (or schoolwide
assemblies) exerts an indirect, coercive pressure to conform to what the
teacher says to do and peers can be observed as doing. Even when
opt-out provisions exist, it is socially costly for children to appear
to question the teacher’s wisdom or to deviate from the behavior of
their peers. When mindfulness activities are scattered throughout the
school day—a few minutes of meditation several times daily—opting out is
practically impossible without withdrawing from school altogether.
For those who seek to alleviate the suffering of others, it is
crucial to respect the freedom of students and their parents to choose
their own cultural, religious, and spiritual resources. Mindfulness
instructors have an affirmative ethical obligation to supply full and
accurate information needed for participants to give truly informed
consent. This is especially important with vulnerable populations such
as young and impressionable school-aged children, particularly those
from families living in poverty or near poverty, who have been entrusted
by their parents to the public schools for a secular education.
–Candy Gunther Brown
Candy Gunther Brown, Ph.D., is Professor of
Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author
or editor of five books, including Testing Prayer: Science and Healing and The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America.
YES—mindfulness is a secular practice that benefits students.
Concerns about teaching mindfulness in public schools and the
potential violation of the separation of church and state it may imply
are responsible and justified. It seems to me, however, that the
practice of mindfulness is not itself the problem. Rather, the problem
is the conflation of mindfulness and religion. Yet while mindfulness is
an ethos—the core being “Do no harm”—mindfulness is not a religion. And
while my colleagues and I openly acknowledge the centrality of
mindfulness in classical Buddhist meditation practice, Buddhism holds no
exclusive claim to it. Likewise, religious institutions hold no special
dispensation regarding morals, ethics, and values. While religious
institutions may encourage and reinforce virtuous behavior within a
society, values like clarity, kindness, and compassion are without
ownership. The capacity for human beings to embody these virtues must,
by logical extension, be innate, consonant with the principles governing
the natural world and therefore not reliant on any religious
institution.
By example, the capacity to be sensitive to the experience, needs,
and perspectives of the “other” embodied in the Golden Rule are not
solely Christian. “Do unto others” affects us deeply because it is
expressly human. Human because each of us knows what it is like to be
treated badly; what it is like to be treated with dignity and respect;
and what it is like to treat another with the same dignity and respect
we would wish for ourselves.
So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is awareness itself—the knowing
capacity that we consider the central feature of our humanness.
Nonreligious, mindfulness does not ask someone to adopt a predetermined
belief system or dogma. In practice, mindfulness offers us a method for
investigating the nature of sentience and sanity. It mirrors the
principles of scientific investigation by providing people with a method
for learning to relate directly to whatever is happening in their
lives. It is impartial. It does not grasp, reject, or prefer; it affords
people the opportunity to see things just as they are, unclouded by the
usual filters of conditioning and culture. Highly relational,
mindfulness is a way of attending to the ever-changing nature of life.
It offers us the possibility of recognizing our deeply conditioned
tendencies, less in the thrall of habit and so more capable of making
wise and appropriate choices. At the same time we learn to take things
less personally. For most human beings, the exercise of these
capabilities is both compelling and emancipating.
Our children need to learn about these capabilities early in their
lives. By all accounts, childhood stress is on the rise in the United
States. According to the 2014 Children’s Defense Fund report entitled
The State of America’s Children, the United States ranked first
among industrialized countries in gross domestic product, health
expenditures, and number of billionaires. Yet the U.S. ranked
second-to-worst in childhood poverty—1.2 million public school children
are homeless. Every 2 seconds, a child is suspended; every 9 seconds, a
high school student drops out; every 30 seconds, a student is corporally
punished; every 3 hours, a child or teen is killed by a firearm; every
4.5 hours, a child or teen commits suicide; and every 5.5 hours, a child
or teen dies of abuse or neglect.
Research suggests that impulse control and the ability to manage
emotions have a powerful impact on our children’s ability to choose
their behaviors. Self-regulation appears to have a stronger association
with academic achievement than IQ or entry-level reading or math scores.
Mindfulness seems to improve executive function (focus and
self-regulation) and enhance emotional acumen and so may be an effective
means for reducing poor performance or failure in school. It likewise
encourages perspective taking and prosocial behavior. While far more
scientific investigation is required to help us understand the potential
role of mindfulness in the lives of our children, preliminary evidence
is encouraging.
Mindfulness training fits into our educational tradition. The great
American educator John Dewey said, “An ounce of experience is better
than a ton of theory.” Children experiencing firsthand the feeling of
calmness, psychological stability, and emotional intelligence are
reasserting their inherent capacity for self-regulation, discernment,
and confidence. Simply put, mindfulness is a technology—an elegant means
of investigating what it means to be alive, and to meet the stresses
and challenges of life across one’s lifespan.
Our National Institutes of Health (NIH) are interested in
mindfulness too. They are confident that mindfulness training is not
promulgating a religion or a religious practice. Multiple institutes are
funding mindfulness studies to investigate and understand the
underlying biological, psychological, and neural mechanisms of
mindfulness. In the past five years, more than 2,000 papers
investigating mindfulness in the basic and clinical sciences have
appeared in scientific literature. In January 2014, researchers from
Johns Hopkins University published a large meta-analysis of meditation
studies. Their conclusion: mindfulness meditation can help ease
psychological stresses like anxiety, depression, and pain. In October
2015, American Psychologist published a special issue on the basic and clinical science of mindfulness.
My home institution, the University of Massachusetts Medical
School, is a public institution and the birthplace of mindfulness-based
stress reduction (MBSR). We have a Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab. We
study mindfulness; we publish the results, allowing for a free exchange
of ideas critical to the scientific enterprise. While mindfulness is not
a panacea, it may be a critically important aspect of our national
public health strategy. More than 22,000 patients have completed our
MBSR program. More than 6,000 physicians and hundreds of other
health-care professionals have referred people to our MBSR Clinic.
Christian ministers, rabbis, Catholic priests, and Hindu pandits have
participated in MBSR, and so have their parishioners and congregants. As
far as I know, none of them has reported that mindfulness disrupted
their faith tradition. Quite the opposite: many report that mindfulness
has deepened their faith, prayer life, and sense of connectedness.
For seven years we embedded an MBSR Clinic into a large community
health center caring for underserved, underrepresented populations in
Worcester, Massachusetts, providing access via free childcare and
transportation. Participants included African Americans; Latinos from
central, south, and Caribbean-rim countries; and native and immigrant
Caucasians, all with income levels below the national poverty line. We
have taught mindfulness to prison inmates and correctional staff in
prisons across Massachusetts. Mindfulness is being taught to diverse
populations of school-age children in the cities of Oakland, Baltimore,
New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles—to name a few. Our Center is
actively engaged in diversity and inclusion initiatives aimed at
recruiting and developing a diverse MBSR teacher corps.
When I ask myself the question, “Should mindfulness be taught in
public schools?,” my first response is, “It depends.” First, mindfulness
in schools needs to be studied scientifically. All results, positive
and negative, need to be published. Second, if the people teaching
mindfulness in schools push Buddhism or any other faith-based worldview,
my answer is an emphatic no. Third, mindfulness educators teaching in
schools ought to be assessed regularly for both competence and
continuing education in their field. If these educators are intent on
reducing suffering and increasing well-being in our nation’s children,
and because of this commitment engage in rigorous,
mindfulness-based
professional education and training programs focused on teaching
mindfulness in nonsectarian settings, I vote yes and applaud their
efforts. Let’s face it: the future of our children is our national
responsibility.
–Saki Santorelli
Saki Santorelli, Ed.D., MA, is Professor of
Medicine, Director of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic, and
Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health
Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He
is the author of Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness.
Illustrations: Pep Montserrat/Marlena Agency
