An invitation to attend “Managing Stress: How Mindfulness Training in Our Schools Can
Benefit Students, Educators, and Parents” at the local high school in Fairfax,
Virginia captured my attention. Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio and author of “A
Mindful Nation” is the featured speaker. The event on June 9, 2014 is
advertised as a partnership between MINDS, The Josh Anderson Foundation, and
Fairfax County Public Schools.
Various sites present mindfulness as a simple breathing
meditation of 4-5 minutes at the start of every class, “replacing instant work
demands with the expectations that students simply be.” What is “simply be” and how do you replace
work demands instantly by existing? My indoctrination
radar came on. I was not sure yet what “simply be” was but I did find out that
you can get a Master’s Degree in Mindful Studies.
The “secular” practice of mindfulness is “rooted” in
Buddhism. Jon Kabat-Zinn established a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Myla
Kabat-Zinn and Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “Learning to Breathe: A Mindfulness Curriculum for Adolescents to
Cultivate Emotion Regulation, Attention, and Performance.” As a former
educator, the indication that emotion must be regulated into a perfectly
attentive automaton bothered me because every child is an individual with a
certain attention span, interest, emotion, and level of curiosity. How would
calming a person make them excel in life?
Patricia C. Broderick, in “Learning to Breathe,” wrote
that “meditation skills help students improve emotion regulation, reduce
stress, improve overall performance, and develop their attention.” The program was
designed to be compatible with school curricula and could be used by mental health providers.
The six core lessons, Body, Reflection, Emotions,
Attention, Tenderness, and Healthy Mind Habits are obviously not going to let
students just “simply be.” What are
these mindfulness skills? A quote by the World Teacher, Krishnamurti (born in
1895 in India) and used in the “Mindfulness in Education, Learning from the
Inside Out” video is quite telling:
“You want to have
your own gods – new gods instead of the old, new religions instead of the old,
new forms instead of the old – all equally valueless, all barriers, all
limitations, all crutches. Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new
spiritual distinctions; instead of the old worships you have new worships. You are
all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on
someone else, for enlightenment on someone else; … you must put them all away
and look within yourselves for the enlightenment, for the glory, for the
purification, and for the incorruptibility of the self…”
Amy Burke mentions in the video that we need to learn to
listen to our hearts. Is that a good idea for young people to listen to their
hearts when they are already confused and raging with hormones? She advises the
use of a chime bar in class to center the students. “We know that it is going
to take time to restructure education.” Do we really want or need to
restructure education on the tenets Buddhism?
Debbie DeGroff discusses the video “Mindful Schools: In Class Instruction,” in which she learned
that in June 2010, Mindful Schools has indoctrinated over 8,000 children in 34
Bay Area schools, 74 percent of which were low-income. Children were told to
keep a journal of “simply be” and of “notice their breath without judgment.” One
entry is full of spelling errors. It appears that students should have spent
more time on spelling and less on mindfulness indoctrination. “what I
lrend abo_ot mindfulness is when you have thogh just get your net an cach the
buderfly that let it go away.” Mindfulness
is encouraged at bed time as well. (Debbie DeGroff, Catching Butterflies,
February 26, 2014)
Mindful Schools boast 200,000 students in 48 states and
43 countries who were impacted by their program. One course is called Meeting
Resistance. Mindfulness is not just a “particular way of paying attention, the
mental faculty of purposefully bringing awareness to one’s sensory experience,
thoughts, and emotion by using sustained attention and noticing experience
without reacting,” it is a much more insidious form of indoctrination. Mindful
Schools were even featured in a Time cover story. www.mindfulschools.org
Many schools are already using the “Learning to
Breathe: A Mindfulness Curriculum and William
Glasser’s Choice Theory. “Students are motivated more by their internal
needs rather than traditional external needs.” “Boss teachers” are the
traditional teachers who use the method of rules and consequences, mandated
curriculum, and standardized assessments.
“Lead teachers” instruct based on
the basic needs of each student. Students actively choose how and what they are
taught and the teacher structures the lessons around the student’s
desires. Only good grades are given and,
if a student fails, the course is not recorded. What a formula for future
failure!
The Mindfulness teachers are promoted as “quiet revolutionaries”
who will change the education system by paying attention to the inner life of
children and of their teachers. PBS is selling the DVD, The Buddha, a film by
David Gruben.
Dr. Amy Saltzmann describes Mindfulness in the context of
global citizenship. “As a classroom
teacher, you already know that many of your students are stressed… You have
also most likely realized that student stress frequently inhibits their ability
to learn, and that the emphasis on academics is neglecting the development of
the social-emotional qualities essential for skillful world citizenry…
“
She also describes a study of mindfulness group of
students vs. a control group in which the mindfulness students showed a
significant increase in global
assessment of functioning (GAF) scores. GAF is used by mental health
clinicians and physicians to rate subjectively
the social, occupational, and psychological functioning of adults.
Shouldn’t schools concentrate
on academics instead on the “Still Quiet Place” of meditation found inside you?
It is outrageous that, by using Buddhist meditation, our children are diagnosed
and treated psychologically without parental consent and, as Debbie DeGroff
aptly described, “exposing a wound that we don’t have the skill to attend to.”
The Department of Education spent $1.2 million on a grant
to research mindfulness. Whatever happened to the separation of church and
state that liberals scream about when the mere mention of God is made in
schools? Why are we allowing Far East mystical practices to come into our
public schools under the guise of stress management? Why are our children being
constantly experimented on by the latest fad pushed by liberals/progressives
who view the classroom and our children’s minds and future as their laboratory?
Progressives hope to shape our children’s minds into a more “compassionate”
society, brainwashed into overcoming suffering, and recognizing the natural
wisdom of Gaia. “Mindfulness is pure religion” and our children are not lab
rats.
NOTE
For further links and sources readhttp://www.insectman.us/misc/creation/common-thread-mindfulness.htm
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