Discuss the issues presented in the essays written by Quindlen and Purser.
ANNA QUINDLEN
Doing Nothing Is Something
Anna Quindlen is a bestselling author of novels and children’s books, but she is perhaps most widely known for her nonfiction and commentary on current events and contemporary life. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her “Public and Private” column in the New York Times, and for ten years she wrote a biweekly column for Newsweek. Some of her novels are Object Lessons
(1991), Blessings (2002), and Every Last One (2010). Her nonfiction works and collections include Living Out Loud (1988), Thinking Out Loud (1994), Loud and Clear (2004), and Good Dog. Stay. (2007).
1 Summer is coming soon. I can feel it in the softening of the air, but I can see it, too, in the textbooks on my children’s desks. The number of uncut pages at the back grows smaller and smaller. The loose-leaf is ragged at the edges, the binder plastic ripped at the corners. An old remembered glee rises inside me. Summer is coming. Uniform skirts in mothballs. Pencils with their points left broken. Open windows. Day trips to the beach. Pickup games.
2 Hanging out. How boring it was.
3 Of course, it was the making of me, as a human being and a writer. Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass, or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
4 And that, to me, is one of the saddest things about the lives of American children today.
Soccer leagues, acting classes, tutors- the calendar of the average middle-class kid is so over the top that soon Palm handhelds will be sold in Toys “R” Us. Our children are as overscheduled as we are, and that is saying something.
5. This has become so bad that parents have arranged to schedule times for unscheduled time.
Earlier this year the privileged suburb of Ridgewood, New Jersey, announced a Family Night, when there would be no homework, no athletic practices, and no after-school events. This was terribly exciting until I realized that this was not one night a week, but one single night. There is even a free-time movement, and Web site: familylife1st.org. Among the frequently asked questions provided online: “What would families do with family time if they took it back?”
6 Let me make a suggestion for the kids involved: How about nothing? It is not simply that it is pathetic to consider the lives of children who don’t have a moment between piano and dance and homework to talk about their day or just search for split ends, an enormously satisfying leisure-time activity of my youth. There is also ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call “doing nothing” is when human beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call. Perhaps we are creating an entire generation of people whose ability to think outside the box, as the current parlance of business has it, is being systematically stunted by scheduling.
7 A study by the University of Michigan quantified the downtime deficit; in the last twenty years American kids have lost about four unstructured hours a week. There has even arisen a global Right to Play movement: in the Third World it is often about child labor, but in the United States it is about the sheer labor of being a perpetually busy child. In Omaha, Nebraska, a group of parents recently lobbied for additional recess. Hooray, and yikes.
8 How did this happen? Adults did it. There is a culture of adult distrust that suggests that a kid who is not playing softball or attending science-enrichment programs- or both–is huffing or boosting cars: If kids are left alone, they will not stare into the middle distance and consider the meaning of life and how come your nose in pictures never looks the way you think it should, but instead will get into trouble. There is also the culture of cutthroat and unquestioning competition that leads even the parents of preschoolers to gab about prestigious colleges without a trace of irony: This suggests that any class in which you do not enroll your first grader will put him at a disadvantage in, say, law school.
9 Finally, there is a culture of workplace presence (as opposed to productivity). Try as we might to suggest that all these enrichment activities are for the good of the kid, there is ample evidence that they are really for the convenience of parents with way too little leisure time of their own. Stories about the resignation of presidential aide Karen Hughes unfailingly reported her dedication to family time by noting that she arranged to get home at 5:30 one night a week to have dinner with her son. If one weekday dinner out of five is considered laudable, what does that say about what’s become commonplace?
10 Summer is coming. It used to be a time apart for kids, a respite from the clock and the copybook, the organized day. Every once in a while, either guilty or overwhelmed or tired of listening to me keen about my monumental boredom, my mother would send me to some rinky-dink park program that consisted almost entirely of three-legged races and making things out of Popsicle sticks. Now, instead, there are music camps, sports camps, fat camps, probably thin camps. I mourn hanging out in the backyard. I mourn playing Wiffle ball in the street without a sponsor and matching shirts. I mourn drawing in the dirt with a stick.
11 Maybe that kind of summer is gone for good. Maybe this is the leading edge of a new way of living that not only has no room for contemplation but is contemptuous of it. But if downtime cannot be squeezed during the school year into the life of frantic and often joyless activity with which our children are saddled while their parents pursue frantic and often joyless activity of their own, what about summer? Do most adults really want to stand in line for Space Mountain or sit in traffic to get to a shore house that doesn’t have enough saucepans? Might it be even more enriching for their children to stay at home and do nothing? For those who say they will only watch TV or play on the computer, a piece of technical advice: The cable box can be unhooked, the modem removed. Perhaps it is not too late for American kids to be given the gift of enforced boredom for at least a week or two, staring into space, bored out of their gourds, exploring the inside of their own heads. “To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do,” said Victor Hugo. “Go outside and play,” said Prudence Quindlen. Both of them were right.”
RONALD E. PURSER
Mindful Schools
Ronald Purser is Professor of Management in the College of Business and the Educational Doctorate in Leadership program in the College of Education at San Francisco State University.
His scholarship currently focuses on mindfulness in organizations and how Buddhist psychology and Buddhist social theory can inform social change and transformation. In “Beyond McMindfulness,” a 2013 article for the Huffington Post, he argued that mindfulness practice has been commercialized and reduced to a mere “self-help technique.” “Mindful Schools” is an excerpt from his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
(2019).
1 With its promise to reduce mental health problems while improving emotional self-discipline, concentration, and “executive brain function,” mindfulness is popular in schools. Although the materials used are different, the framing of the programs is the same as elsewhere, touting support from neuroscience and distancing the practice from religion. Instead, there is a general focus on results–particularly raising test scores and easing the stress caused by constant pressure to achieve. There are also claims that mindfulness can help the disadvantaged to become more resilient in the midst of poverty, crime and racial violence. However, these external conditions are not discussed. As usual, the emphasis is on individuals looking inside themselves, instilling a neoliberal mindset in young people.
2 The missionary zeal and humanistic rhetoric- with which the benefits of mindfulness are promoted in schools masks an underlying authoritarian tone. Popular images of students sitting calmly in the classroom, focusing tamely on the task at hand, suggest they have been saved from distracting emotions and unruly impulses. However, they are also regarded as victims–fragile, vulnerable, dysfunctional, and “at risk.”
3 Although there is some truth to this–with apparently increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm-schools teach children to handle problems by self-pacifying. The issue is how they react, not the conditions to which they react. This therapeutic approach is conservative, directing attention away from the outside world. Mindfulness could be an empowering and emancipatory practice, exploring ways to change social conditions and priorities. Instead, it maintains the status quo. Students are taught to meditate away their anger and accept their frustrations (non-judgmentally, of course). This might help them focus on work, but unless they also learn about the causes of stress in social, economic and institutional structures, links between education and democracy are severed.
4 Meanwhile, a political orthodoxy has emerged around the idea of a mental health crisis, despite many ambiguities in how “emotional disorders” and “mental ill health” are defined.
Mindfulness in schools could not have become as popular as it has without the cultural norms of
a therapeutic culture, effectively telling us we need help which we’ll get, whether we like it or not, along with training in obedience.
5 Consider the Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP) in the United Kingdom, which has trained over 4,500 teachers, aiming to bring “face-to-face quality mindfulness” to one million children within the next five years. The MiSP curriculum, dubbed “dot-b” – which is shorthand for “Stop, Breathe and Be!” – was conceived by two educators, Richard Burnett and Chris Cullen (now at Oxford). It likens mindfulness for students to disciplining pets. “Attention is like a puppy,” says the scripted syllabus, “It doesn’t stay where you want it to.” It also “brings back things you didn’t ask for [and] sometimes it makes a real mess.” Therefore, “in training our minds we have to use the same qualities of FIRM, PATIENT, KIND REPETITION that are needed in order to train a
puppy.”
Mindfulness to the Rescue
6 In the United States, mindfulness in education comes with government funding and media attention. The Mindful Schools non-profit organization in Oakland, California, runs trainings for teachers who are said to have “impacted” two million students. Their programs came to national prominence via the documentary Room to Breathe, aired on PBS with enthusiastic media coverage. Raving about the film, the Washington Post called mindfulness “the fastest-growing technique in classrooms for teaching self-control.”
7 Room to Breathe follows Megan Cowan, the co-founder of Mindful Schools, as she spends several months teaching mindfulness to “troubled kids” at Marina Middle School in San Francisco, known for its high rate of disciplinary suspensions. The trailer shows students-primarily of color-shouting, pushing and hitting each other. The words LOUD, CHAOTIC, and OUT OF CONTROL flash onscreen before cutting to Cowan striking a Tibetan singing bowl in the classroom, and suddenly … all is … calm.
8 The film itself has a fairly predictable savior narrative. Despite being confronted at first by defiance, Cowan’s devotedly selfless service wins students over. After learning mindfulness techniques, they report the usual benefits: feeling calmer and better able to concentrate which, on the face of it, is surely a good thing. But, as noted by the activist scholar Jennifer Cannon, Room to Breathe “reinscribes a racialized discourse about ‘troubled’ youth of color and introduces a white mindfulness instructor as the teacher-hero.”
9 Gentle, benevolent, and patient, Cowan plays the part effortlessly. She tells the students that mindfulness is unqualifiedly good for them; as a form of self-discipline, it will help them succeed in school and work. As with most programs in schools, we do not see anything in the curriculum that turns mindful attention and critical inquiry to social and economic context. Could their behavioral problems, poor academic performance and stress be related to living in impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, or being the victims of institutional racism? Evidently not, from the mindful teacher’s point of view.
10 This is part of the problem. School mindfulness programs mostly shy away from what David Forbes, a Professor of Educational Counseling at Brooklyn College, calls “the critical cultivation of awareness, appreciation, and employment of the cultural context and cultural capital of both students and educators.” In other words, there is a glaring absence of the sort of liberating critical pedagogy that might educate people out of oppression. That omission, Forbes explains, contributes in itself to reinforcing “racist systems within education that in turn reproduces racism in the larger social structure.”
11 At one point in Room to Breathe, Cowan’s inner authoritarian is revealed. She seems ill-equipped to handle disruptive students in a class of thirty who show no interest in mindfulness. As Cowan says to the camera: “If there were five of them that weren’t in there, then the majority of them would be trying, would be participating.” One of those is Diego, a Latino who tells her “it’s boring.” Losing her patience, she orders four students to leave her class. “It’s like hitting a brick wall,” she says. “I just am frustrated, and kind of hopeless. The defiance is so deliberate and I don’t know if I can work with that in this large a group.” Following this incident, Cowan consults with the Assistant Principal, who gently admonishes her, reminding her that “this is a public school, and we take everyone. Excluding students, that’s a paradigm I don’t want to set up.” However, it seems that she stuck to her decision–the disruptive students do not appear again.
12 Instead, the wisdom of the mindfulness teacher is valorized, along with her status as disciplinarian. Rather than exploring the strengths and talents of the young participants in her class, the film mostly highlights their defects, until Cowan transforms them into a room full of docile meditators. The audience gets a warm glow, and can feel optimistic about the potential for improving urban education perhaps even making a donation to Mindful Schools. However, without also making radical investments in social change, all this does is focus attention on individuals, reforming students and not the system that trains them, let alone the broader social problems it reflects.
13 Much of the rhetoric in Mindful Schools’ literature depicts students of color and those from poor working-class communities as dependent on welfare, and lacking agency and power–and therefore in need of saving. Thankfully, the civilized mindfulness teacher most often white and affluent has the agency, cultural capital, and goodness of heart to instruct the benighted in emotional etiquette. Parallels with Christian missionaries are not accidental- sentimental “do-gooding” mentality is deeply ingrained among the privileged, whose blindness to the causes of injustice stems in part from how they benefit.
14 “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” writes Teju Cole in The Atlantic. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” The sincerity of well-meaning efforts makes it hard to critique their general naivete, but unless outsiders are seeking to learn from the people they “help” – particularly about systemic solutions to their problems- then they may well make things worse by applying the calming balm of mindfulness.
15 There is an unspoken taboo in the mindfulness movement regarding such criticism. It is tantamount to blasphemy to question the impact of teachers and their programs, since they all believe so evangelically in their goodness. And since mindfulness seems to bring relief, it is thought to be pointlessly “negative” to start picking holes in what teachers are doing, or the motives behind it. Those teaching mindfulness in schools are not usually afflicted by the socio-economic inequalities driving the problems they address. Sure, their hearts may be in the right place, but we can’t say the same for their critical thinking skills.
Cognitive Capitalism
16 Mindful school advocates seem to be especially oblivious to how their programs serve the prevailing social order. Mindfulness doesn’t exist in a political vacuum; it’s shaped by neoliberal ideas, which influence us all unless we consciously resist. Children are schooled to prepare them for roles in an increasingly competitive capitalist system. Mindfulness is therefore a way to boost resilience, producing young subjects who can manage their emotions and deal with the stress of a market-based world. Since schools are increasingly subject to market forces think privatized charter schools and voucher schemes in the US and academization in the UK- they seek to prove their performance with measurable outcomes. Mindfulness helps improve test scores and student behavior, both of which make managers look good.
17 “The mindful, ‘happy’ person emanating from the school system is grist to the cognitive capitalist mill,” warns the skeptical scholar James Reveley. Neoliberal logic requires self-promoting and self-disciplined subjects, in charge of their own wellbeing and success, whatever disadvantages they might have to overcome. From a neoliberal perspective, society doesn’t exist everything comes down to individual choices and responsibilities. As Reveley observes: “It is a tall order to ask young people to reject these ideals at the same time as they are being taught to embrace them through a self-technology that stresses self-responsibility.”
18 However, none of the providers of mindfulness in schools discusses this problem, or the need to address it. Focusing instead on achievement-oriented passivity, their programs indoctrinate students to see themselves as vulnerable. In order to be successful in school and life, they learn to “manage” their emotions with therapeutic mindfulness. Feelings should be accepted non-judgmentally, without distinguishing between “good” and “bad” ones, or what they tell us. What happens if a vulnerable student experiences a strong and difficult feeling due to prior trauma? Teachers rarely have the psychological training for such situations, and research on the adverse effects of mindfulness is often ignored. Indiscriminately teaching it to all children could be irresponsible, given the paucity of rigorous studies that show clear benefits beyond pacification.
19 By pathologizing strong feelings, and teaching children “emotional literacy,” the curricula of mindfulness in schools instill a strong sense of “correct” behavior, along with the implication that anything else is “incompetent” or “illiterate.” In The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes warn that this mentality “erodes the idea of humans as conscious agents who realize their potential for individual and social change through projects to transform themselves and their world and replaces it with a narrow, introspective view of what it means to be human.
20 Some programs have tweaked their curricula to add other messages. In the US, Mindful Schools now talks about “The Development of Heartfulness,” which it describes as “intentional nurturing of positive mind states such as kindness and compassion.” Yet the general emphasis is on awareness of the present moment, which means tuning out of feelings and thoughts. “At its most basic level,” says the UK’s Mindfulness in Schools Project, “mindfulness helps train your attention to be more aware of what is actually happening, rather than worrying about what has happened or might happen.”
21 Although this sounds like engagement with “now,” it teaches quietism. Especially in the early years of education, much of the focus is on “school readiness,” conditioning students to comply with rules, norms and behavioral demands. Mindfulness is part of this package when taught to young children this has worrying implications. “The emphasis on sublimating strong emotions such as anger could send unintended messages about not speaking up in the face of injustice,” says Natalie Flores, “dissuading children’s later participation in social activism.” Others say programs should explicitly focus on social justice, especially when offered in low-income areas. Rather than using mindfulness “to make calm test takers,” explains Funie Hsu, a progressive approach would include critical analysis of systems of power, “to enliven our students’ hearts so that they are stirred to creating the world that they deserve.”
22 Hsu cites one of the pioneers of socially engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh, who describes the need to combine mindfulness with action. “When bombs begin to fall on people, you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time,” Hanh says. “You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing mindful breathing.”