The Biden-Harris administration is promoting the use of controversial meditation, yoga, and “mindfulness” techniques derived from Buddhism and Hinduism in public schools, although studies have found the practices have a negative effect on young people’s mental health. In addition to promoting a supposedly secularized form of non-Christian religion and its attendant worldview, the administration’s guidelines encourage teachers to have students ruminate on any beliefs they have that might hinder the progress of “equity.”

As students begin heading back to school, hundreds or thousands of teachers will be conducting “mindfulness” classes purportedly aimed at reducing stress and improving focus after the pandemic lockdowns. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has drawn up a six-part strategy allegedly aimed at improving students’ mental health after the lockdowns. The “CDC has identified six school-based strategies and associated approaches that can help prevent mental health problems and promote positive behavioral and mental health of students,” states its website.

The second plank instructs schools to “Promote Mindfulness,” including “[p]racticing mindful breathing, meditation, and movement, such as yoga.” The CDC tells school districts to “Dedicate Time for Students to Independently Practice Mindfulness.” For instance, “Students and staff could practice mindfulness during morning meetings or advisory periods, after recess, or before the start of a regular class.” Additionally, young people may engage in “small group mindfulness activities,” which are “often led by a counselor.”

Like many schools participating in the program, Brooklyn College Academy has dedicated a meditation room with mats and cushions, where teenagers sit cross-legged as instructors guide them through a series of breathing techniques. Sometimes they focus on visualizing images suggested by their instructors; sometimes they empty their minds and replace the contents with nothingness. Linda Mary Noble, a social studies teacher whose love of “mindfulness” led her to create a meditation room inside her public school, said she loves “this idea of [her students] having a space that they’re not getting in a home. I feel that this is a gift.”

Other school districts teach the methods through software such as Inner Explorer, an audio program that asks children to listen to the sound of chimes and other noises as it guides them through a 5-10 minute meditation.

“Imagine a school setting up a chapel in the school, with kneelers and Gregorian chants playing. "Would the average person find the chapel overtly religious?” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at the Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “If so, why then are schools making ‘mindfulness spaces,’ which are nothing more than chapels of another sort?”

Although proponents of “mindfulness” techniques present the method as “secularized” in public, all acknowledged the programs replicate methods taught by non-Christian religions and New Age gurus. “Mindfulness is a bit of a catch-all term for a secularized version of practices that draw from religions like Buddhism and Hinduism,” reports NPR. The practice of mindfulness “draws on Buddhist thinking,” notes the website StudyFinds.org. The Brooklyn College Academy meditation room was publicly reported in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. The magazine did not distinguish between the school system’s purportedly “secular” mindfulness and Buddhist practices.

Despite their inherently religious characteristics, mindfulness classes have swept through America’s supposedly secular public school system. Inner Explorer is used in 100 school districts, including the Atlanta Public Schools. The group Mindful Schools is working with 245 schools this academic year. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, nearly 1,000 teachers had received training in yoga, meditation, and tai chi by 2020.

Some of the classes have successfully inculcated Buddhism-derived “relaxation” practices in young schoolchildren. “I got into meditation in ninth grade because of Dr. Noble; she started doing it in the beginning of our global class,” attested 15-year-old Damkina Jeromey. In Georgia, nine-year-old Malachi Smith said he now regularly uses Inner Explorer exercises at home with his father. That concerns Christians, and non-New Age parents of all backgrounds.

“Research has shown that one’s worldview begins to form around 15-18 months and is set by age 13. We also know that children will spend 16,000 hours in school between kindergarten and 12th grade. Thus, at the precise time that a child’s worldview is forming, he is spending thousands of hours in school, being discipled by those who do not have a biblical worldview,” David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, told TWS.

Closson said the incorporation of “so-called ‘mindfulness’ initiatives into the curriculum serves as yet another reminder that schools are not neutral when it comes to worldview. In fact, most public schools are hostile toward Christian values and are actively promoting beliefs contrary to those found in Scripture. Everyone has a worldview, and most people are enthusiastic evangelists for their worldview.”

“I’m not surprised that the CDC and various school districts are pushing yoga and so-called ‘mindful breathing’ exercises on students,” Closson remarked.

The Biden-Harris administration has promoted the New Age-aligned “mindfulness” techniques with relish. CDC guidelines encourage public schools to “give students an opportunity to learn more about mindfulness and how to use it to cope with strong feelings or emotions,” as well as to:

• “Train teachers and staff on the importance of mindfulness.
• “Train teachers and staff on strategies for building mindfulness into the day.
• “Offer mindfulness opportunities for staff and teachers.”

“For example, leaders could give staff a mindfulness minute every morning or offer mindfulness projects, including student-led projects, at the district level,” the CDC notes. However, it adds that “mindfulness activities may not be useful for everyone. Invite teachers, staff, and students to incorporate mindfulness into their lives, but do not pressure them to do so.”

In a uniquely left-wing fashion, the Biden-Harris administration encourages public schools to use meditation to change children’s worldview. CDC guidelines instruct schools: “Explore mindfulness practice as a way to advance equity.” (Emphasis in original.) “Mindfulness activities can help teachers and students create a more inclusive classroom. For example, mindfulness activities can help teachers and students reflect on their assumptions and behaviors in ways that can help identify and reduce bias.”

“Instead of ‘mindfulness’ these exercises become mere grievance rumination." And that’s not likely to be helpful or healthy for anyone,” Kilgannon told TWS. “There is no fourth grader in the world who can solve the problem of racism, end hunger, or stop oppression; but that fourth grader can learn about the history of his city or state, read about important American and world leaders, memorize math facts, begin to learn about the periodic table of elements, study how trees turn sunlight and air into food, etc. There are so many things children can learn at school that offer them the chance to aspire to a better life and a world beyond our current day’s problems.”

If the CDC hopes mindfulness will reduce stress, they ignore the best studies on the topic, which show the techniques offer no benefit and sometimes worsen adolescents’ mental health. An early study from 2016 found “insufficient or inconclusive evidence for its benefits.” The most robust research conducted on the subject eventually discovered students who went through school mindfulness training had no positive mental health outcomes. The MY Resilience In Adolescence (MYRIAD) study observed more than 28,000 students and 650 teachers in 100 U.K. schools over eight years.

The use of mindfulness techniques actually “resulted in worse scores on risk of depression and well-being in students at risk of mental health problems” than doing nothing at all, researchers noted in their report published in the Evidence Based Mental Health journal. However, they wrote these differences were minimal. Students reportedly found the exercises “boring,” according to the BBC, which labeled mindfulness in school “a waste of time.” Any positive effects “washed out after one year.”

“This rigorous, large-scale study found that when mindfulness training was delivered at scale in schools it did not have an impact on preventing risk of depression or promoting well-being in students aged 11 to 14 years,” confessed Miranda Wolpert, the director of Mental Health at Wellcome of the study, which was conducted in concert by Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of Exeter, Kings College London, University College London, and Pennsylvania State University.

“The use of this specific school-based mindfulness curriculum as a universal intervention for young people in early adolescence is not indicated,” the study concluded.

Yet that may not dissuade the practice’s most ardent supporters, who attempted to integrate meditation into public schools long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Several years ago, schools began using mindfulness as part of the “restorative justice” movement. A 2016 article notes that, instead of punishing school troublemakers, Baltimore’s Robert W. Coleman Elementary School sent youthful offenders to a “mindful moment room,” where they would engage in breathing and relaxation exercises before meeting with a counselor to talk about how to manage their feelings. Yet those associated these techniques with punishment rather than relief.

Powerful forces in the public and private sectors support introducing these techniques to young minds in a public school setting. Before the Biden-Harris administration began promoting these techniques, often found in New Age settings, others in government forced taxpayers to underwrite such programs. Former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who lost in the 2022 Senate race to Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, was such a committed practitioner of transcendental meditation that he helped introduce the practice into kindergarten classes at Youngstown schools with a $982,000 federal earmark in 2009. Brooklyn College Academy built its meditation room in 2017 thanks to a $10,000 grant from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 

More often, public schools have built meditation/mindfulness centers as part of a public-private partnership. Farmers Insurance gave the Brooklyn school $100,000 to expand its use of meditation techniques. A similar program in tiny Rex, Georgia, in Clayton County is funded by GreenLight Fund Atlanta. The Steve Fund has financed similar efforts nationwide. The latter two groups focus primarily on minority students, presenting New Age-derived meditation techniques as a solution to black and brown students’ mental health crises. The movement’s stubborn promotion (and financing) of mindfulness in schools despite the negative evidence seems to show its unbounded faith in Buddhist-lite meditation.

“Make no mistake: the introduction of these practices is not neutral when it comes to worldview formation and discipleship,” Closson concluded. “Parents need to be aware of this reality and respond in appropriate ways.”