Of course, it's now that Yoga Ed is entering the public school system. Like the fun that starts ten minutes after you leave the party, yoga becomes a means for helping students to focus soon after I graduate from high school. What I would have given for a mandatory de-stressor during those years! Well, it looks like our younger counterparts are getting one because Yoga Ed is taking public schools by storm in districts all over the nation: from Seattle and Los Angeles to cities in Colorado, Ohio, and Tennessee. Oh, wait��maybe not Colorado.
In a 1979 New Jersey case, a court found the teaching of transcendental meditation in schools a violation of the First Amendment. The Aspen school district is now facing charges from a group of parents led by a Baptist minister who is citing this case as reason to discontinue Yoga Ed: Yoga introduces religion into the curriculum, thereby linking church and state. As a result, the district is eliminating some of the quasi-spiritual portions of the teaching (like mantras) and will likely make the class itself optional.
The ability to concentrate is key to an education. Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses are soaring, and Ritalin prescriptions follow, because we all agree that kids who cannot concentrate are disadvantaged in the classroom and therefore deserve assistance. But offering this assistance through natural means to all students--regardless of religious preference or income--warrants public outcry, the courts involvement, and finally an amended program. What makes one socially acceptable and the other a reason for debate?
The easy answer is constitutionality. It is an issue of religion and government. But the more interesting answer reveals a great and frightening irony in America's idea of education: mental health is relevant to education only where it can boost a child's ability to learn, but where mental health becomes the focus and education the tool to strengthen it, relevance becomes debatable. "Leave that up to the parents!" What is the effect of this widespread understanding that school is not responsible for mental health?
We are.
The rate at which mental health declines with educational advancement is shocking. Each year, Duke Counseling and Psychological Services sees proportionately more students than the year before, and that trend extends beyond Duke to the academic and corporate worlds, where the demand for depression/anxiety medication is also on the rise. A hypochondriac contagion fueled by the pharmaceutical ad industry is partially responsible, but there is more going on than a booming ad industry and a babyish workforce. There is a reason why people feel they need mental health assistance in the first place, why surface-successful people are drawn to pharmaceutical promises.
My guess? For 16-plus years, America's educated have functioned within a system that rewards productivity. They have, in fact, trained their brains to function as productivity mechanisms, and a natural amount of strain ensues from this training. At no point in the process, however, does the education system instruct students in methods for coping with this strain. So, as adults, the products of the system treat mental health as they have seen it treated by their mentors, secondary to work ethic.
Instead of making lifestyle changes that could abolish mental strain at its origin, we take a pill, block a pathway, keep up (or pick up?) the pace without any trace of lifestyle change. First things first; we have work to do.
Freshman year I took a bio-psychology course that convinced me that sleep is overrated. The gist was as follows: Studies show that while people who sleep less than five hours a night are destined to experience frequent "microscopes" (you jerk your head up in class after one of these), your cognitive reasoning seems not, I repeat not, to be affected by sleep-deprivation. My interpretation was that sleep's expendability is now scientifically sound! I was thrilled.
Unfortunately, the theory did not work for me that spring. I literally applied it to my life and slept no more than five hours a night for the last two months of school. It was moronic, a juvenile association of fatigue with admirable work ethic; I made the worst grade I have made at Duke that semester and went home sick, twice. But it took these events to knock some sense into the go-go-go mentality that I had learned to associate with success.
Whatever wide or narrow road we are all shuffling down in one large academic herd, it is one that has both promising and ominous ends. Financially, we are set. Psychologically, we are at risk. If parents and teachers truly care about the long-term health of students, they will be open to programming that integrates mental well-being into school curriculum. There is too much evidence to deny that mental health is invariably linked to education.
I doubt Yoga Ed will ever take nationally. There are too many groups that overlap, if nowhere else in society, to oppose it: religious fundamentalists, the universally under-funded school administration, the pharmaceutical industry. But as a small-time yoga practitioner, I think it has potential to dramatically change the trend of unfocused students and stressed adults who depend on medicine to curb their moods--and to do so through natural, self-directed means. Of course, that is exactly what the pharmaceutical companies and religious fanatics are afraid of, right?
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