Transcendental meditation for school kids

“Now when people mess with me I don’t hit them,” explains Talford. “I sit down and try to meditate.”

- Newsweek.com, “Can meditation help at-risk kids?“

Devout Baptist George Rutherford spent 20 years as principal of one of the toughest middle schools in Washington, D.C. stumbled onto transcendental meditation.

“I feel it is the greatest savior other than Jesus Christ that I know.” Rutherford, his teachers and his students began meditating in the classroom twice a day for 20 minutes.

As Wikipedia states, Transcendental Meditation (TM) is “the trademarked name of a meditation technique introduced in 1958 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917-2008)”, the guru popularized by The Beatles.

Boiled down, the practice consists of sitting in a comfortable position with the spine straight, calm breathing, with a word or phrase repeated for twenty minutes.

Many schools now include yoga in phys-ed, but some parents are taking issue with this form of meditation:

“TM has always been rooted in the religion of Hinduism,” says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which keeps a close legal eye on the TM movement. “There are no imminent cases right now, but people, including conservative Christian parents will say if Christianity can’t be taught in the public schools then Hinduism can’t be either.”

As Scott Michael Stenwick points out in his blog Augoeides:

[S]some of the other techniques that could be taught instead carry a lot less of the cultural baggage which is the source of most of the complaints. Zazen immediately comes to mind here, as it can be practiced without even the minimal trappings of Soto Zen Buddhism. As practiced by the Soto school, the technique is just sitting – no initiations, no mantras, no pujas.

-Augoeides, “Meditation in Schools“

I’m glad they’re trying something, but Stenwick has a point, Rutherford could have chosen a school of meditation without a trademarked name and the associations it carries.

Even so, the opening quote of this post kind of sums it all up.

Via Augoeides.

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