Meditation in schools: secularizing a spiritual practice?

Meditation is playing an increasingly important role in everyday life, at work and now at school. Is its entry into the educational sphere as harmless as it seems?

Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier

How can we explain the gradual move of meditation from the health section of the media to the "education" section? The entry of this practice, originally religious and Buddhist, into the public and secular educational sphere raises a series of questions about its definition, modalities, links with learning and aims. With the entry of mindfulness meditation into schools, can we secularize a spiritual practice?

According to Edouard Gentaz, a professor of developmental psychology, meditation has produced encouraging, but still debatable results in the fight against anxiety, stress management and improved self-awareness.

The rise of this practice is supported by health professionals, and psychiatrist Christophe André has enjoyed great success in bookshops with his account of the benefits of meditation in hospitals and in everyday life. Its integration into research programs and university medical courses has become commonplace, as in Strasbourg, Paris and Montpellier.

From the world of work to education

As a stress management method, meditation was bound to be of interest to managers. In just a few years, mindfulness has made a name for itself among corporate and personal development coaches, making it a tool forbusiness efficiency and employee employability.

At the same time, advances in research seem to legitimize the use of meditation by demonstrating its benefits for brain structure and function. Matthieu Ricard, the popular Tibetan monk and doctor of cellular genetics, constantly emphasizes the importance of the interaction between meditation and neuroscience, as well as the spiritual purpose of this practice.

Eline Snel 's publishing successes, starting with her book Calme et attentif comme une grenouille (Calm and Attentive as a Frog), with a preface by Christophe André, appear to be the first step towards integrating meditation into the educational sphere. In the wake of these books, which have become a kind of teaching method, publications introducing meditation to children have flooded in.

Between pedagogy and relaxation

These media successes - and the advantages recognized by teachers themselves - have made it a pedagogical tool, used in several education systems to improve the well-being, attention and performance of pupils , as in Canada and the Netherlands.

Meditation evokes a child's emotions, attention span, benevolence and resilience. The question, then, is how to implement this originally spiritual practice, which touches on psychology and the unconscious, in public education. When teachers introduce it into their classrooms, is it really meditation? Or should it be seen more as a pedagogical tool, a relaxation or sophrology session?

The Association for Meditation in Education seems to be coordinating numerous projects, without any real assessment or evaluable results. An international program called MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) is defined as a protocol for the use of meditation in teaching.

This integration into the educational sphere is actively supported by Emergences, an organization that seeks to disseminate all notions and practices of personal development. Its members include Christophe André, Mathieu Ricard, Frédéric Perez, Ilios Kotsou, Frédéric Lenoir and Céline Alvarez, who jointly published Transmettre, a compendium of the relationship between personal development and education.

A framework for discussion

The religious nature of meditation is often overlooked, but there is a real need to reflect on the integration of spiritual practice into secular public education. We need to know what meditation is used for: simple relaxation, breathing exercises, development of attention to enhance learning, reduction of violence at school, personal emancipation or enhanced employability of future employees.

Can this practice be "compatible" with secular schools? Should schools teach mindfulness? If so, teachers need to be trained. By focusing on children's "consciousness", the question of the responsibility of schools and teachers arises.

No choice has yet been made by the educational institution, leaving the way open for all the actions and definitions of mindfulness meditation such as making it a penalty replacement. The national education system needs to address the increasing number of disparate interventions by associations that are not always accredited, and the growing interest of teachers in this practice, which opens up a whole new field of unexplored possibilities.

Sylvain Wagnon, Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier

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