Meditation in schools: Secularizing a Spiritual Practice?
Meditation is playing an increasingly important role in daily life, at work, and now in schools. Is its introduction into the educational sphere as innocuous as it seems?
Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier
How can we explain the gradual shift of meditation from the health section of the media to the “education” section? The introduction of this practice—which has its origins in religion and Buddhism—into the public and secular educational sphere raises a series of questions about its definition, its methods, its links to learning, and its purposes. With the introduction of mindfulness meditation in schools, can a spiritual practice be secularized?
According to Edouard Gentaz, a professor of developmental psychology, meditation yields encouraging results, to be sure, but these are still open to debate when it comes to combating anxiety, managing stress, and gaining a better understanding of oneself.
The rise of this practice is supported by healthcare professionals, and psychiatrist Christophe André has enjoyed great success in bookstores with his writings on the benefits of meditation both in hospital settings and in everyday life. Its incorporation into research programs and university medical curricula has become commonplace in cities such as Strasbourg, Paris, and Montpellier.
From the workplace to education
As a stress management technique, meditation was bound to attract the attention of the business world. In just a few years, mindfulness has gained widespread recognition among personal and business coaches, establishing itself as a tool for enhancingbusiness efficiency and improving employees’ employability.
Furthermore, advances in certain areas of research appear to validate the use of meditation by demonstrating its benefits for brain structure and function. Matthieu Ricard, the widely popular Tibetan monk and doctor of cellular genetics, consistently emphasizes the importance of the interplay between meditation and neuroscience, as well as the spiritual purpose of this practice.
Eline Snel’s publishing successes—and foremost among them her book *Calm and Attentive Like a Frog*, with a foreword by Christophe André—appear to mark the first step toward her integration into the educational sphere. In the wake of these books, which have become a sort of teaching method, there has been a flood of publications introducing meditation to children.
Between education and relaxation
These media successes—along with the benefits recognized by teachers themselves—have made it an educational tool that has been adopted by several education systems to improve students’ well-being, attention, and performance, as seen in Canada and the Netherlands.
Meditation helps cultivate children’s emotions, attention span, kindness, and resilience. The question, then, is how to implement this practice—which has spiritual roots and touches on psychology and the unconscious—in public schools. When teachers introduce it in their classrooms, is it really meditation? Or should we instead view it as an educational tool, relaxation sessions, or sophrology?
The Association for Meditation in Education appears to coordinate numerous projects without providing any real assessment or measurable results. An international program called MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) is defined as a protocol for the use of meditation in education.
This integration into the educational sphere is actively supported by Emergences, an organization dedicated to promoting the concepts and practices of personal development. Among the members of this association are Christophe André, Mathieu Ricard, Frédéric Perez, Ilios Kotsou, Frédéric Lenoir, and Céline Alvarez, who have jointly published the book *Transmettre*, a collection of essays exploring the relationship between personal development and education.
A framing issue to be discussed
The religious nature of meditation is often overlooked, but it seems necessary to give serious thought to the idea of incorporating a spiritual practice into secular public education. It is important to understand the purposes for which meditation is practiced: simple relaxation, breathing exercises, developing attention to enhance learning, reducing school violence, personal empowerment, or enhancing the employability of future employees.
Can this practice be “compatible” with a secular school system? Should schools teach mindfulness? If so, teachers need to be trained. When we consider children’s “mindfulness,” the question arises of the responsibility of schools and teachers.
The school has not yet made a decision, leaving the door open to all possible approaches and definitions of mindfulness meditation, such as turning it into a replacement of punishments. The Department of Education must address the issue of the growing number—and increasing diversity—of initiatives by organizations that are not always accredited, as well as teachers’ growing interest in this practice, which effectively opens up a whole new field of possibilities.
Sylvain Wagnon, Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.