“We’ve been waiting for this to happen somewhere, and we drew the short straw,” says Fiona Jensen, the founder and executive director of Calmer Choice a non-profit organization providing mindfulness education to 8 school districts in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
The short straw she’s referring to is a recent legal notice claiming that the Calmer Choice program “is dangerous for children and violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by promoting Buddhism.” An attack on mindfulness in schools.
This legal opinion was submitted by the National Center for Law and Policy (NCLP), a right-leaning, legal defense organization focusing on religious freedom and civil liberties. It calls for the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District to end its mindfulness program and cancel all contracts with Calmer Choice. This action was carried out on behalf of a parent, Michelle Conover, a Christian conservative author and recent addition to the Dennis-Yarmouth district school board.
The NCLP’s president and chief counsel Dean Broyles issued a statement, declaring, “State schools have no place conducting dangerous psychological and spiritual experiments on our children.” He went on to compare mindfulness to “rainbows, sunshine, and unicorns,” saying that the marketing of mindfulness overshadows the research showing that it can do serious psychological harm and even lead to psychotic breaks.
The Research on Mindfulness and School Kids
The assertion that mindfulness can harm children hasn’t been proven yet in peer-reviewed research. “This notion is currently based on anecdotal reports,” says Jensen. “It is the very beginning of looking into something by one researcher who may be publishing some data on this soon. This is really important research and we’re following it closely.” The researcher Jensen is referring to is Dr. Willoughby Britton, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University Medical School.
Dr. Willoughby was profiled inThe Atlantic in 2014 and the NCLP opinion actually cites her commentary from this article, and its anecdotal stories from meditators, as proof of the harm caused by mindfulness. (It’s interesting to note that Willoughby, a 20-year meditation practitioner herself, is actually the author of some peer-reviewed research finding that “mindfulness training actually improves well-being.) Despite Willoughby’s work on the potential dangers involved in mindfulness practice, when approached by educators who want to bring mindfulness to their schools, her response is: “Be prepared to be wildly successful.” She’s referring to the excitement most students have when mindfulness is introduced, at the same time, cautioning that psychological material can come up during meditation. So far, her studies into the adverse effects of meditation have been on long-time practitioners.
“The article about Britton is entirely anecdotal,” says Jensen. “And when you weigh that against the work that has been done in quantitative research over the last 14 years on the positive benefit for mindfulness in education, the quality and rigor of the positive research clearly indicates that there is a benefit for mindfulness in education.” A few recent studies are:
- A 2016 study in Frontiers in Psychology measured emotional well-being of 7 to 9 year-olds and found that a school-based mindfulness program improves higher order thinking, and helps students become more engaged, positive learners.
- A randomized controlled study in the Journal of School Psychology on more than 100 sixth grade students found those who completed classroom-based, teacher-implemented mindfulness meditation, were significantly less likely to develop suicidal ideation or thoughts of self-harm than the control groups.
- A study of 4th and 5th graders published in Developmental Psychology found that students who received mindfulness training improved their cognitive ability and stress physiology, reported greater empathy, perspective-taking, emotional control, and optimism, showed greater decreases in self-reported symptoms of depression and peer-rated aggression, and were more popular.
But the NCLP doesn’t just warn that Calmer Choice might be harming children with mindfulness. The legal opinion goes even further, suggesting that Calmer Choice is actually teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which is, they assert, a form of “stealth Buddhism.”
“We do not teach MBSR,” says Jensen. “We are not certified to teach MBSR, nobody who works at Calmer Choice has been trained at UMass Medical or anywhere else where they are teaching MBSR.” Despite this claim, the NCLP opinion accuses Calmer Choice of teaching MBSR 79 times.
“MBSR is rooted in Buddhism. Even purportedly ‘secular’ MBSR programs have been documented as having a religiously transformative impact, acting as a ‘gateway’ to Buddhism and a Buddhist worldview.” –Dean Broyles, president and chief counsel of the NCLP
“Without question,” argues Broyles, of the NCLP, “in spite of extensive camouflaging efforts, MBSR is rooted in Buddhism. Even purportedly ‘secular’ MBSR programs have been documented as having a religiously transformative impact, acting as a ‘gateway’ to Buddhism and a Buddhist worldview,” he continues. “MBSR simply does not belong in public schools.” The NCLP contends that teaching mindfulness in public schools is in direct violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
“There’s just no question in the way that the constitution is currently being interpreted,” says Susan Kaiser Greenland, JD, lawyer, author, and former co-investigator on a multi-year, multi-site research study at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center on the impact of mindfulness in education. “Just because an activity might be shown to have roots in a religion, doesn’t necessarily mean it violates the Establishment Clause,” she argues.
What is the Establishment Clause?
For those of you who don’t remember your constitutional law, the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion. And what constitutes the “establishment of religion” is often decided by a three-part test that came out of the US Supreme Court in a case called Lemon v. Kurtzman. The so-called “Lemon Test” allows the government to sidle up next to religion only if (1) the primary purpose of the assistance is secular, (2) the assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion, and (3) there is no excessive entanglement between church and state.
“The test for whether something violates the Establishment Clause is never whether an activity has roots in a religion. The first thing you look at is whether the program has a secular purpose—whether what i