Meditation back to ease stress in schools
Published Wednesday May 20th, 2009
MONCTON - Extreme levels of stress in schools are leading to poor academic achievement, substance abuse, bullying and teacher burnout, according to a New Brunswick-based group.
Clarence Cormier, president of the Canadian Association for Stress-Free Schools, said Tuesday the answer to each and every problem is radical but within everyone's reach - meditation. "It's that simple," said Cormier, a former education minister in the Hatfield government and a former mayor of Dieppe.
Cormier, 79, said that, while the idea is unconventional, it's not impractical. He said the discipline of going beyond reflective thinking into deeper relaxation and awareness would be part of the common curriculum, if he had his way.
Cormier watched on Tuesday as Ashley Deans, a physicist and the director of a kindergarten-to-Grade 12 school in Fairfield, Iowa, spoke in both Saint John and Moncton on the rewards of transcendental meditation.
Deans has travelled the world several times over pitching the idea.
His funding comes from Hollywood millionaire David Lynch, a director, writer and producer who has become a seeker of world peace.
Cormier said that when he was an education minister he investigated every program available to help students to gain the most from their education. He began meditating himself in the 1970s.
"The transcendental meditation program is the only program that I know of that could help every student," he said.
"As education minister, I explored it." He said the Tory cabinet scoffed at the idea.
"At the time, my colleagues didn't see the importance of it," he said. "But the research wasn't there the way it is now."
Cormier left his politics in the 1970s to pursue the art of meditation in Italy. When he returned, he still found little support for meditation in schools.
He now points to Deans and his private school of 200 students as the way to go.
The Grade 10 to 12 students consistently score in the top one per cent of the nation on standardized tests. More than 95 per cent of the school's graduates are accepted at four-year colleges. The association's website lists a number of similar success stories.
Deans said he is implementing the program school by school.
Schools in more than 50 countries, mostly private, now use the technique, including eight schools in Canada.
A spokesperson for the association said a First Nations school in New Brunswick is in the preliminary stages of implementing the program.
Deans said in his address to a group of teachers at a Moncton-area school that hundreds of studies now show meditation is helpful to higher learning.
"The technique is so simple for children it allows the mind to settle down to the state of inner silence," he said. Deans now calls it "the quiet time program," where children have 15 minutes of solitude twice a day. Some use it for meditation. Students who do not want to participate can simply draw or pass the time quietly.
The Canadian Association for Stress-Free Schools provides educators, government leaders, health professionals, and foundations with a complete introduction to the meditation program. While the association is registered as non-profit, its website does list fees for the service to schools.
Deans said it has been an uphill battle to get public school systems to listen.
"The beauty of an uphill battle is that once you get to the top of the hill everything is easy from there on," Deans said. "I have been at this for 35 years now and we have completed that battle.
"Thirty years ago...people would say this is crazy, people didn't understand what we were talking about. But now...the evidence is there."
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Research at the Medical College of Georgia found reduced absenteeism, school rule infractions, and suspensions among students practicing TM.
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