They Want Kids to be Robots: Meet the New Education Craze Designed to Distract You from Overtesting

(Credit: NI QIN via iStock)

From inner-city classrooms to wealthy boarding schools the mindfulness juggernaut has hit education. A recent Atlantic article shows that despite its “inherent nebulousness” as a concept and little evidence that mindfulness impacts academic success, educators and researchers are doubling down selling it to schools, students and teachers. Proponents want to show that mindfulness is real, practical, and can benefit everyone. They want students and teachers to de-stress, be compassionate, and better regulate their own thoughts, feelings and actions.

But it’s time to confront this movement with its own mindlessness. Socially engaged mindful practitioners have forged a backlash to mindfulness in the corporate sector. In education as well we need to ask why this is happening now on such a large scale and who stands to gain. The bottom line answer is the same: neoliberal education policymakers want to play up corporatized culture and market values at the expense of democratic ideals in order to further advance the privileged few.

They see mindfulness as a way to amp up an education system that will createcompliant students who can manage their own behavior, focus on their assignments, and calm themselves when angry or frustrated with school. Such students can then turn into passive, unquestioning consumers and cooperative workers who will help their corporate employers better compete in the global economy.

A desirable feature of a corporatized society is the neoliberal self. Neoliberal ideology demands that each private person be entirely responsible for their lives and free of any dependency on public institutions, which are to be phased out. Each of us should meet all our needs for well-being and health through self-help products and marketing strategies for success such as discipline and competitiveness. Neoliberal ways of governing employ technologies of the self—self-help practices that yield new subjects who see themselves as responsible for their own social welfare and well-being. In short, mindfulness is a technology of the self.

What becomes of the goal of stress reduction when neoliberal culture sees stress as a personal failure of the individual to successfully adapt to the demands of productivity or of being a team player? Mindfulness proponents train individual students and teachers to be present-focused, self-regulate difficult emotions such as anger, improve concentration, get along with others, and decrease stress. This masks the actual conditions of schooling, including adverse ones that give rise to stress, and any critical analysis of the cultural, social, and moral factors that contribute to one’s well-being or lack of it.

Children learn to see stressful experiences and how they respond to them as their responsibility—there is something inside of me I alone must change instead of looking at how my problems arise within unjust societal relationships and systems. Benign on the surface, mindfulness becomes a disguised pedagogy of social control. It plays into the hidden neoliberal agenda: internal regulation, compliance, individualist responsibility to adjust to high stakes tests and the overall degradation of public education.

Read full article here: http://www.salon.com/2015/11/08/they_want_kids_to_be_robots_meet_the_new_education_craze_designed_to_distract_you_from_overtesting/

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