HuffPo And RusSim Love TM™ In Schools
FIle under: The Siddhi of PR
Arianna Huffington, Russell Simmons, the surviving Beatles and wackjob film director David Lynch all want religion in your childrens' schools.
While we agree that a secularized form of meditation could benefit many kids around the country, TM™ meditation is a religion that arrives with a whole float of ideological assumptions about the world and the TM™ founder, the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Do whatever you can to resist these dilettantes from determining what religion your children are exposed to in the context of their public education (hint: it's supposed to be none.)
Labels: The Siddhi of PR
posted by guruphiliac @ 1:13 PM
6 Comments:
School sounds to me like a tricky place to try to introduce meditation. I think it would give advocates of prayer in the schools something to point to as helping to justify their cause of eroding the separation of church and state. And there’s no neat way of distinguishing secular from religious meditation unless you were to offer kids no more than a sort of “meditation lite,” teaching them that it’s just about relaxing their bodies and slowing down their breathing. If you really get a person to turn off their mental chatter they may just go ahead and have a religious experience no matter what you tell them or don’t tell them – it doesn’t require doctrine and it doesn’t support doctrine, although it’s often used that way.
Without having read anything on the subject, I also have to wonder how (and whether) meditation works for kids. It may be that it does, but as a kid, I find it hard to picture myself getting into it or even just sitting still that long without feeling like I was being punished!
Kinda lame that you unilaterally equate meditation with religion.
Kinda lame that's what you see me saying. TM™ the org is clearly religion.
I feel this is much ado about nothing. I grew up a Hindu kid in India, but went to a school which was founded by Scottish missionaries. We sang the Lord's prayer and hymns in our morning assembly. Yet, I don't consider that my impressionable mind was indoctrinated with Christian religious beliefs. All of us non-Christian kids (the overwhelming majority) turned out just fine.
I really don't believe introducing TM to kids in US schools would render the kids vulnerable to the TM ideological belief-system. The benefits would be significant, and the purported risks negligible, especially because it would be practiced in the safe, secular school environment. I'm pretty sure if the TM were to be introduced, it would be a sanitized version, anyway.
If schools nationwide would independently recognize the benefits of mindfulness practice and include some instruction as part of their curriculum, so as to equip kids with what I consider to be real education with lifelong value, there would be no need for organizations like the TM movement to step in and take the initiative.
Sorry, I was sleepy and missed your secularized part. And I agree with Paul Maurice.
"The benefits would be significant"
Utterly specious reasoning, especially under the risk of Church/State.
Similar would be introducing Scientology "tech" in schools, which they already try to do.
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