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The current version is very close to the one published on line. For citations use:

Ergas, O. (2015). The deeper teachings of mindfulness-based curricular interventions as a reconstruction of “education”. Journal of Philosophy of Education 49 (2), 203-220.

The deeper teaching of mindfulness “interventions” as a reconstruction of “education” Oren Ergas, Hebrew University, School of Education, and MUDA, the Israeli Center for Science, Mindfulness and Society, at the Unit of Applied Neuroscience, IDC Herzliya

Abstract: While contemplative practices have emerged from wisdom-traditions, the rhetoric surrounding their justification in contemporary public educational settings has been substantially undergirded by the scientific evidence-based approach. This paper finds the practice and construct of “attention” to be the bridge between this peculiar encounter of science and wisdom traditions, and a vantage point from which we can re-examine the scope and practice of “education”. The paper develops an educational typology based on “attention” as a curricular deliberation point. Every pedagogical act rides over a meta-pedagogical injunction of where to attend to find that which society deems worthwhile. The deep curricular teachings thus begin in the question where knowledge of most worth exists (in here or out there) and precede content. It is at this hidden level in which our spatial-temporal disposition towards life-meaning can be shaped. Following this typology, the paper will suggest that beyond what may be critiqued as instrumental mindfulness-based curricular “interventions” that cater to an economic educational narrative lurks the trajectory of a contemplative educational turn that may be outwitting over-instrumentalization through wisdom-traditions.

This paper argues that there are roughly two orientations undergirding the justification of

contemplative practice in education. One stems from wisdom traditions (Eppert &

Wang, 2008; Hattam, 2004; Lin, Oxford & Brantmeier, 2013), the other, from empirical

science (Davidson et al, 2012; Greenberg & Harris, 2012; Zenner, Herrnleben-Kurz, &

Walach, 2014). Currently the scientific evidence-based approach seems to be the more

dominant rhetoric undergirding the incorporation of contemplative practices in the

curriculum (Ergas, 2014; Hyland, 2014). Critics claim that this approach bears the risk of

flattening and diluting these practices, both through the process of their remolding to

allow for scientific validation (Nelson, 2012), and through their dissociation from the

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ethical grounds within wisdom-traditions (Refs. From this SI; Posner & Loy, 2013). A

plausible claim proposed by some (ref. from this special issue) thus suggests that

contemplative practices introduced as curricular “interventions” geared toward

instrumental aims - such as improving attention (Napoli et al, 2005), enhancing executive

functions (Flook et al, 2010), and tending to teacher burnout and well-being (Roeser et

al, 2012) - might be eroding a much fuller ethical educational potential inherent in the

origins of contemplative practices within wisdom-traditions. This paper acknowledges

these limitations; however, it claims that the scientific “face” of

mindfulness/contemplative based curriculum “interventions”, hides the far deeper

educational transformative agenda of “the contemplative turn” that is depicted based on

the perspective of attention. Students that are skillfully instructed in the practice of

mindfulness as part of their school day (even when instrumentally construed), are

receiving “deep teachings”, some of which can be elaborated as follows: (a) attending

the present-moment inner experience is an educationally worthwhile activity, (b) Our

inner-world is a meaningful arena, (c) meaning might exist here and now and not only in

the future in which a certain educational aim might be achieved. These, I suggest,

constitute a substantial re-construction of what we have been accustomed to refer to as

“education”.

In order to make these claims, the paper depicts attention, as the intersection

between both justificatory strands of contemplative practice in the curriculum, and a

locus from which we can re-examine “education”. Attention is interpreted here as a ‘T-

junction’ for it can only be oriented in two ways: either in here (to our interiority) or out

there (to the “world”). Any act of teaching in the classroom is inevitably based on a

teacher’s deliberation between asking students to attend in here or asking them to attend

out there moment after moment. This constitutes the level coined here as meta-pedagogy -

the scaffold of all pedagogies (e.g., asking questions, writing on the board, reading,

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writing) – and a fundamental teaching, that either explicitly or implicitly tells the student

where meaning is to be found.

The meta-pedagogical scaffold of contemplative practices, now introduced in

schools, deliberately engages students with in here and now. By so doing contemplative

practices are introducing an alternative curricular deliberation; one that inevitably

challenges the very concept of “curriculum” as a “course of study” and its implications to

our conception of life-meaning and where we ought to look for it (in here and/or out there).

Such observation however, can only come in to view, as we seriously examine

“education” from the locus from which attention is actually deployed – the student’s

mind. From this first-person perspective, mindfulness practice in its common rendition

is not about science, stress-reduction or higher achievements. It is about dwelling in the

here and now, and gradually realizing that there is no place “better” than now.

Paradoxically, this is a radical critique of the very essence of the “curriculum”, which

inevitably proposes that reaching the “end” of “the course of study” will in effect bring

us to a “better” time and place.

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part describes some main features

of what has been construed as an emerging “contemplative turn” in education (Ergas,

2014; Eppert, 2013), and the ways in which it is brought about by curriculum theorists

interpreting wisdom traditions on the one hand, and evidence-based research on the

other. The second part, constituting the main argument of the paper, reads “education”

from the perspective of attention as the point at which the two above-described strands

intersect.

Part I: Two Justificatory paths undergirding a contemplative turn in education

In the past few decades we are witnessing a growing interest in the incorporation

of contemplative practices in the public curriculum, spanning primary, secondary, and

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higher education (Barbezat & Bush, 2014; Greenberg & Harris, 2012). This interest is

reflected in the work of institutions such as the Mind and Life Institute, the Garrison

Institute, the Association of Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, networks such as

Mindfulness in Education, and in a host of contemplative-based curriculum

“interventions” spreading across North America and Europe (e.g., MINDUP, ‘.b’

curriculum). Such “interventions” involve the introduction of practices such as

mindfulness, yoga, compassion meditation, journaling, and other practices referred to as

“contemplative”, into public schools.

Yet, the presence of contemplative practices in a public curriculum that is

substantially undergirded by what some critics see as “economic imperialism” (Gilead,

2012) is by no means an easy fit. To many, it might not at all be clear whether and if at

all, “observing one’s breath”, “scanning bodily sensations”, journaling or performing

yogic postures – all of which are at times referred to derogatively as “naval gazing” -

could possibly contribute to measurable economically-rendered aims by which some

countries tend to assess the quality of public education. On top of this economical

perspective, given the origins of many contemplative practices within wisdom traditions

(e.g., Buddhism, Taoism), advocates of contemplative practices are constantly struggling

with the need to legitimize these practices given diverse conceptions of the relation

between spirituality, religion, and education (Hyland, 2014). One encounters such

tensions in the example of a 2013 parents’ lawsuit against California’s Encinitas County

that has incorporated yoga across its curriculum, accusing the schools of proselytizing a

religion to students.1

Broadly speaking, I suggest that there have been two major approaches oriented

towards tackling these and other challenges. On one side lie curriculum theorists, many

of which are featured in this special issue, whose justificatory paths stem from the

broader framework from which contemplative practices emerge, namely, wisdom

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traditions. These scholars rethink educational theory through concepts that stand at the

heart of these traditions (e.g.,refer to writers of this special issue) and emerge from

traditional texts and their contemporary interpretations, as well as from various

renditions of contemplative practice. These examples suggest a deductive path in which a

notion of education is derived from diverse wisdom-traditions that offer a robust ethical

discourse grounded in principles, texts, and practices. The clear advantage to this strand

is that once this broader framework is appealed to, contemplative practices flow naturally

into the curriculum, just as they are natural to their traditions of origin. The substantial

disadvantage, however, is that policy makers’ concerns with an economic agenda, on the

one hand, and a public stereotype of contemplative practices as “religious” on the other

hand, together produce quite a difficult audience. Such audience – perhaps constituting

the majority – requires a different kind of argumentation; one that appeals to the

rationally and secularly inclined. This is exactly what the other justificatory path seems to

provide by appealing to science.

The scientific justificatory path has been emerging in the past two decades with

an exponential rise in the scientific study of mindfulness (Black et al, 2012) and other

contemplative practices. There is now an increasing body of research showing that

mindfulness practice has a substantial effect on both cognitive and affective aspects

undergirding teaching, learning, and school life. The rhetoric of this path is substantially

different than the one proposed by the former path. It is formed inductively, based on

garnering evidence that demonstrates the positive effects contemplative practices have

on the brain, their contribution to nurturing health, their role in improving psychological

well-being and in enhancing performativity. This path has been substantially more

influential in current educational circles than the previous one. The reason for this might

be that it effectively targets both the economical and the “religious” concerns standing in

the way of incorporating contemplative practices in the curriculum along the lines

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advocated by the first strand. Here science serves as a legitimizing, secularizing vehicle

that wittingly - or unwittingly, as the case may be - dissociates contemplative practices

from their conception as “religious” or “spiritual”. As Hyland (2014) has summarised:

Contemporary therapeutic applications of mindfulness in…education…are unequivocally secular in all senses of the term…their aims are essentially pragmatic and make little or no reference to the spiritual traditions in which mindfulness originated (p. 9).

The scientific evidence-based approach gives contemplative practices a scientific ‘face’.

These are ‘curricular interventions’, and scientists are seeking the appropriate ‘dosage’

recommended for their incorporation in schools (Davidson et al, 2012). These

interventions also target economic problems of schooling, such as teacher burnout and

teacher’s well-being (Roeser et al, 2012). The location of the discourse surrounding

contemplative practice in the curriculum within this economic orientation matches the

interests of many policy makers and principals, particularly in the midst of a climate in

which accountability and standardization hover over decision making processes.

The scientism surrounding mindfulness and contemplative practice in the

curriculum can be seen to be nested within a broader discourse - the contemporary and

highly contested debate around the attempt to mobilize education towards becoming a

“hard” science that matches the rigorousness of natural sciences (Philips, 2014). Current

educational practice tends to be obsessed with assessing performativity, far more than

with the “selves” (or no-selves) behind the performance or with providing students with

meaningful reasons for why they should perform at all – i.e. why we are here? Who we

are? How ought we live? The discourse of justifications for contemplative practices,

accentuates this issue because threading wisdom traditions through the eye of the needle

of quantitative science so that they fit the bill of an economic-secular public educational

ethos inevitably yields reductionism as apparent in a number of papers in this special

issue. Framing contemplative practices as curricular “interventions” makes one think that

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they are “add-ons” patched onto the margins of the timetable. They are not part and

parcel of the “real business” of schooling, which is more likely understood in terms of

the day-to-day routine of math, history, science etc.. They might be ways to scaffold

“education” but they are not the “thing” itself.

What this seems to me to be is yet another version of the ancient rivalry between

science and religion, reason and spirit, yet now manifesting in the arena of “education”

(Ergas, 2014). The great paradox we find is that the very richness of the wisdom-

traditions from which a robust educational theory might be derived is simultaneously a

source of controversy that prevents many from considering contemplative practices as

legitimate pedagogies in school. This is where this paper proposes a substantial shift and

attempts to offer a different angle.

I suggest that the debate between the above two justificatory strands is important

yet it fails to make a crucial distinction, between the social phenomenon of the

dissemination of contemplative practices in the curriculum, and what contemplative

practice actually looks and feels like from the perspective of the student who engages in

these “interventions” in practice. While we academics debate whether or not this scientism

is an impoverishment of contemplative practice and/or a missed educational and ethical

opportunity, students are actually practicing meditation, introspection, yoga, mindfulness

and other practices in schools and universities. The far more optimistic view developed

in the next part of the paper is that we may call this “stress reduction” or what you will

and think that these are “interventions”, but in effect these practices are transforming the

understanding of “education” and the “educated person” through the nexus in which

contemplative practice, science and education intersect- attention.

Part II: Attention: The intersection of science, wisdom-traditions and education

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Attending to the theme of this special issue, I propose that science, wisdom traditions

and education intersect within the practice of attention. Contemplative practices as they

emerge from wisdom traditions can be viewed as ways in which human beings apply the

faculty of attention based on intentional modes that (aspire to) transgress day-to-day

living and foster well-being, concentration, and awareness (Roth, 2008). Training in

attention is conceived either as a foundation for further training, or as the focal point of

practice as in concentration meditation (Wallace, 1999). At the same time, attention has

been central to the scientific study of meditation based on rigorous scientific tools such

as brain imaging. Most notably, it constitutes the foundation of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s widely-

applied rendition of mindfulness: “paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the

present moment and non judgmentally” (1994, pp. 4-5, italics mine). Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR

(mindfulness-based stress-reduction) and its scientific study have arguably been the

driving force behind the mindfulness revolution that has had substantial influence on

many current contemplative curricular-based “interventions” (Ergas, 2014). It is thus

most common to see contemporary evidence-based research treating attention as a focal

point of practice, on the one hand, and as a direct link to education and learning, on the

other hand (Davidson et al, 2012, Zenner et al, 2014). Needless to say, contemporary

school life, riddled as it is with attentional deficits whether diagnosed or not (e.g.,

ADD/ADHD), constitutes a welcoming environment for contemplative practices when

they are referred to as “attention academy” and effectively implemented (Napoli, Kerch

& Holly, 2005).

Establishing the first-person perspective of attention

Arriving at this paper’s core, attention can also be viewed as a foundation from

which to reconsider educational theory and practice. In the following I intend to build

mainly on William James to establish a number of claims that broadly chart how I view

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the “contemplative turn” as transforming and in fact reconstructing “education”. To

begin this reconstruction I reframe a question that David Lewin (2014) posed recently in

this journal: “what is the role of attention in education?” Here I reverse what seems to be

inferred by this question – that “education” as a social construction has primacy over the

human mind from which attention is deployed in practice. That is, first we have

“education”, and a society that constructed it based on a body of knowledge and skills,

and only then do we have a student that attends what society deems worthy. The latter, is

the social perspective from which we are accustomed to consider “education”, yet I claim

that this view ought to be complemented by considering “education” from the actual

destination toward which all our social efforts to educate are geared - the student’s mind.

It is from this mind that attention is deployed and to this resource that society appeals in

its attempt to educate. What this mind will do with this internal resource will to a great

extent determine how successful society’s efforts will be. I demonstrate this standpoint in

the following.

I treat attention as a very basic, unsophisticated, almost mechanistic concept. It

is, "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem

several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought." (James 1890, pp. 403-4).

This is the condition that undergirds the perception of any event whatsoever whether it

is this

word

or

a

thought

in your mind.

The first-person view of “education” that I am after, has just emerged, as I

appealed to your attention and to the mind from which your resource of attention was

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deployed as you sat in school for many years; the mind from which you are attending to

these words right now. What I am after here can be depicted eloquently in the following

Jamesean claim: "For the moment what we attend to is reality" (1890, p. 322).

From the vantage point of our own attention, we can begin to view “education”

from its actual lived experience, and not only from the “bird’s eye view” perspective we

tend to assume when we consider education as a broad social phenomenon. From this

first-person perspective, whatever a teacher does in a classroom is an attempt to orient

our attention one way or another. It is impossible to think of an attempt to teach without

appealing to this fundamental resource that, as James proposed – defines our reality.

When “education” is understood from this perspective it might dawn upon us

that this whole endeavor is based on a resource that is not in the hands of society or the

teacher but rather in the “hands” of the student’s mind. Theoretically speaking, a student

that resists the teacher’s attempt to “educate” her has all the means to do so if she is able

to control her attentional resource. She can attend elsewhere, and by so doing the

content that we as a society attempted to impart to her, will never reach her ears. We

soon return to this idea after highlighting another crucial aspect that is latent in James’

claim concerning education, space and temporality.

Education, attention, space, and temporality

We tend to think of “education” as a “process”, and this proposes the

understanding of “education” as a continuous event that runs over a “horizontal time

axis” of past-present-future. It is this aspect of time that allows us to consider an

educational aim (instrumentally or non-instrumentally conceived). The aims suggest that

there’s a time and place where we are at, and there’s a time and place where we ought to

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go. Walking the distance and the change this necessarily entails is the educational

“process”.

There’s nothing I have against this view and it is quite awkward to think of

“education” without it, however, I suggest that if this is the only way by which we

understand “education”, then we are left with “education” as an abstraction, and not as a

lived experience. Why? Because James’s claim, “for the moment what we attend to is

reality”, asks us to acknowledge that whatever “educational” aim the “process” is to

serve, its actual lived experience is constructed out of moments of attention, now, now,

now.

The horizontal time axis – past-present-future - is a way of organizing

“education” as “process” based on “curriculum”, timetables and so forth. Yet, it is not

the actual life spent undergoing the “educational” process – the life of a “me” that is

sitting there moment by moment in a classroom attending to this, attending to that.

When we start thinking of “education” from this moment-by-moment perspective

suddenly that which happens in the classroom gains far higher resolution. It’s not just

about “Math”, “Geography” or even “life-skills”. In the span of a 45-minute lesson,

there are infinite moments of attention. We would be highly naïve to think that all of

them are spent dwelling on the knowledge and skills that society has in mind as

“education”. Wittingly or unwittingly students have far more intriguing things to attend

to: being jealous of their friends that seem to have nicer clothes, thinking about the

sandwich that’s waiting for them at the end of class, or thinking of how to muster the

courage to ask a girl out. Whether these thoughts arise in their mind based on deep

reflection, mind-wandering or rumination is an interesting question, that is not developed

here. My claim lies elsewhere – in the fact that for some reason we have come to

construct “education” without considering that students’ minds have a say here, as I

develop.

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As implied in the example above, there are only two loci to which we can attend:

in or out. This follows upon another statement made by James that presumably coincides

with your own first-person perspective of attention. "One great splitting of the whole

universe into two halves is made by each of us...we all call the two halves by the same

names…those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively” (1972 [1892], p. 187). Thus, “For

the moment what we attend to is reality”, and our attention tends to split that reality into

two broad arenas. These constitute a spatial split – that James called “me”/”not-me” –

and from the perspective of attention it can be called in here/out there respectively. These

two arenas are sketched and elaborated upon below:

a) In here (dashed arrow) - that which we conceive as within the boundaries of our

minds-bodies (e.g., thoughts, sensations, feelings, emotions, intuitions) or what

we might call our inner-experience. Intuitively, we feel these thoughts, feelings,

emotions, to represent what it feels like “to be me” in here, so to speak.

b) Out there (dotted arrow) – the world surrounding us, along with other beings and

the environment. This is what James refers to as “not-me”.

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Examining “education” from these fundamentals of experience – attention, space and

temporality - we can come to view attention as a ‘T-junction’ that defines our reality.

When it is oriented out there it allows us to see, hear, smell, touch, taste stimuli that we

take as existing out there in the world. When it is oriented in here, it allows us to experience

what we take to be our inner-experience.2

Where does this lead us in the understanding of “education”? - I suggest that this

T-junction can also be conceived as the locus from which two possible educational

rationales emerge. They are formed as we ground our understanding of “education” in

this very empirical and high-definition attentional approach. It is formed by the

cumulative moments of orienting a student’s attention moment after moment either in

here or out there. I call this meta-pedagogy and describe it below as the latent deep teaching

of education in meaning, and the crux of the contemplative turn in education.

Meta-pedagogy

If we think of the term "pedagogy" as the ways in which subject matter is taught,

I suggest that a "meta-pedagogical" perspective implies a principle, which undergirds

many different kinds of pedagogies. Meta-pedagogy is interpreted here as the explicit or

implicit instruction that tells students where to orient their attention moment after

moment. Every action taken by a teacher at school has a content to it, but it also tacitly

builds on a demand that tells the student: pay attention out there (‘not-me’) or in here

(‘me’). Every movement the teacher makes, her writing on the board, showing a

powerpoint presentation, the call to read the textbook, to write in the notebook or the

laptop – they all carry the demand to pay attention built in to the action.

How is this meta-pedagogical level helpful in examining “education”? – It drives

home the pedagogical mechanism by which we are impoverishing in here as we expel our

own selves from the curriculum as I detail.

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When we examine a student’s curriculum and his daily timetable it seems as if he

learns a whole lot of lessons in school – history, geography, math, literature, sciences etc.

Our perspective on what “education” is tends to be caught up in its fancy looks, as we

ourselves attend out there to gaze at the curriculum, but it is the meta-pedagogical level

that carries the essence of what we are doing. When we examine the meta-pedagogical

level, there are only two lessons one can be taught - attend in or attend out, and these are

taught every single moment at school. At this “hidden” level our meta-pedagogical

practice of public “education” is exposed as quite monolithic. Whether explicitly or

implicitly, we educate the young by continuously orienting them either to attend out there

or to think (in here) about out there. Simultaneously we have been banning the possibility of

attending in here deliberately from the curriculum. This is what the contemplative turn is

now seeking to balance. However, before exploring that, in the following I examine our

meta-pedagogy based on these three levels:

(a) Delving more deeply into meta-pedagogical mechanism at work.

(b) Revealing the naivety in society’s meta-pedagogy that reflects little respect,

and little understanding of the human mind that it seeks to educate.

(c) Showing the deep teaching of temporality that the “contemplative turn” is

introducing.

The meta-pedagogical mechanism

In Richard Peters’ words, “Education has worthwhileness built into it” (1966, p.

19). I interpret this to mean, that a child sent on a daily basis to school in which she is

told that she “gets” an “education”, cannot but surmise that this is meaningful,

worthwhile and important. I do not think, however, that we are sensitive enough to the

fact that this does not just apply to the disciplines and skills to which we attribute

meaning. It applies to meta-pedagogy in a far more dramatic way. Our curricular thinking

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may itself reflect the power of meta-pedagogy as it has shaped our habits of thinking

“education”. Being well-trained in attending out, our curricular debates have tended to

revolve around questions such as “what knowledge is of most worth” as Herbert Spencer

famously asked. The perspective of meta-pedagogy inserts a no-less meaningful question

– “Where ought we seek the knowledge of most worth?” Answered, from the first-person

perspective of attention there are only two possible loci - in here or out there. Send a child

to school, and ask her to attend out there or think about out there year after year, week after

week, moment after moment, and you teach her far more than the worthwhileness of the

content – you are teaching her that “education” means attending out there, not-me.

There are two ways in which this deep teaching is driven home, moment after

moment. The tacit or hidden lesson, as I noted, is built into the fact that school has us

attend out there (e.g. disciplinary knowledge, actual pedagogical practice) or think about out

there (e.g., work out a math problem, consider the reasons for WWI) in the very way in

which we constructed the curriculum and in how we teach. But there’s a more explicit

expression of the deep teaching. Consider what happens to a student seemingly absorbed

in his internal world. He will be “awakened” and asked to “pay attention”. The fact is he

may have very well been attentive, yet not to those things that society deems as worthy

and “educational”. He is called “back” to where the “real business of education” takes

place and that’s not in here. This lesson is latent, not in what it says, but in what it doesn’t

say: whatever it is that you were doing in there (in your mind) is either marginal or

meaningless - “education” is not about that. Attend out there for that is the locus in which

meaning is to be found.

There’s a very simple operant conditioning at work here – attending out there is

rewarded, while dwelling in here when not concerned with thinking about out there is

reprimanded.

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While the teacher is out there speaking of Napoleon or Julius Caesar a student can

be miles away worrying about her father’s health, self-agonizing about his weight, or

other personal matters. From the teacher’s point of view as she represents our third-

person social perspective, these thoughts are “noise” that prevents learning and interferes

with “education”. From the student’s first-person experience, these are the fabric of

which life is made, for the stark fact that reality is made from what she or he attends to. He

or she attributes meaning to these thoughts and feelings for the very fact that they have

arisen in here. How can they not be meaningful, if they had just popped up within the

boundaries of my own existence?

Of course, the fact that a student would attribute worthwhileness to his personal

thoughts as part of his existence does not imply that the content of every thought is

necessarily meaningful. However, if he is constantly called upon to abandon these

thoughts, and attend out there, he learns that if they arise from in here and are not to do

with the lesson – they belong to a lesser part of reality. The side that counts really is the

one that society has in mind – the one to which the teacher orients the student time and

again.

Demanding their attention out there moment after moment, students learn that

attending to me is non-educational. Eventually they will arrive at quite a discouraging

conclusion: Education is not about me – in here is the right place to be at. We seem to depreciate

“naval-gazing”, but what we are doing by constantly calling students’ attention out there is

“society-gazing”, “out there gazing” – call it what you will. We are habituating ourselves to

attributing meaning to that which is out there, and when one of us is found “naval-gazing”

(in some sense of the word) he’s called back to the world of “normality”. What we do

not see is that this forceful normative act cannot but simultaneously impoverish in here

and ask it to be molded in the image of out there. If we still see creativity and originality

around us, it must be in spite of this meta-pedagogy, thanks to the fact that society’s

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imperialist practice is not fully successful. As we soon see –the mind has a mind of its

own.

Lest I be misunderstood, I find incredible value in studying the “world” out there

based on some existing curricular practice, and knowing thy “world” would clearly be a

part of any plausible conception of “education” as I understand it. In addition, many

might wonder, what’s on offer here at all? What can be gained by attending in here? It

comes so naturally to us that “educational” practice has to do with having attention fixed

out there or engaged in here in thinking about out there that we hardly consider the

possibility that attending in here for extended periods of time (as contemplative practices

propose) might be educationally worthwhile. This is a crucial question to answer, that I

only marginally address in this paper. My argument has to do with pinpointing a meta-

pedagogical mechanism that has a dual effect: it expels “me” from the curriculum in the

practice of attention moment after moment, and it also constructs our ideas about

“education” that attending out there is what it is about, and how it ought to be conducted.

To further articulate my claim, it is important to note that many have attempted

to insert the more personal and internal aspects of a students’ life into the curriculum.

Nel Noddings (2003) for example, argued for a curriculum that will involve self-knowing,

and include issues such as parenting, hobbies, making friends and other such activities

that seem far more relevant than much of the disciplinary knowledge we find in public

school. Such calls are crucial to the matter. However, my point asks us to postpone the

level of content. Even these personal matters can be taught by pedagogies that continue to

orient student’s attention out there (e.g., watching movies, class discussion, hearing

lectures). These are surely welcome, but they do not create balance at the meta-

pedagogical level that functions most of the time at a tacit level hence its incredible

habituating power.

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This is exactly what is changing now, when students in an Amherst college

Economics’ class engage in compassion meditation to see whether their personal

decision-making processes change as a consequence (Barbezat & Bush, 2014); when

high-school students learn math, while concomitantly journaling their personal

experience of struggling with math (Brady, 2007); or when LA inner-city children are

learning the new ABC of Attention, Balance, and Compassion (Kaiser-Greenland, 2010).

These are all programs and practices that reverse our habitual meta-pedagogy. They tell

students either explicitly or implicitly to attend in here to the “subject matter” of their

own minds. These minds as I now show have a story to tell, and they tell it regardless of

our social ideal of “education”. It is as if we as a society are naval-gazing if we keep

ignoring this stark fact of nature.

The naivety of our social imperialism and our disrespect for the mind

When we start examining the moment to moment experience of an actual student

and the ways in which his or her own mind deploys attention, the third-person

perspective form which we tend to consider “education” begins to feel quite naïve.

Dwelling in the latter perspective suggests that society can go about its business and

attempt to educate, as if the students’ resource of attention is completely in its hands, and

as if the student’s mind does not have its own personal agenda.

Students’ attention often resists our social effort to have them attend to what

society has deemed worthwhile. This can occur as a deliberate attempt on students’

behalf to attend to other interests while the lesson is happening, or a non-deliberate

dwelling in here. James had a dramatic way of saying this when he addressed teachers.

“The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and

eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general"

(1939, p. 10). However, this way of putting things also discloses our social imperialism.

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Our social idea of “education” naturally suggests that the mind is “working away

from” the places that society deems meaningful. Ought we not ask whether these minds

are not “working towards” other places that have worthwhileness built into them? This

applies both to the personal thoughts and feelings that arise in students’ minds

constantly, but it also applies far more dramatically – to the mind’s natural tendency to

get lost in its own web of thoughts in what neuroscientists call “mind-wandering”. Ought

we not examine the very nature of our minds, that as empirical research now shows,

spend almost half their waking hours thinking of things that have little to do with our

actual reality (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010)?

The content that an inwardly-absorbed student might experience in here while

“education” is going on out there might or might not amount to much as already

mentioned. My claim is not an attempt to idolize our wandering monkey-minds, or

consider in here as some romantic locus. Quite the contrary, it is about taking far more

responsibility over this monkey-ness by gazing right at it as part of a reconstructed

“education”. The contemplative turn reflects this for it proposes that the construct of

“education” must include attending in here to directly examine the nature of mind from a

first-person perspective. This is how this comes about:

When a student engages in the actual practice of mindfulness introduced in her

curriculum, as she settles to watch her breath and bodily sensations, the “subject matter”

she will find is not likely to be quadratic equations, Hamlet or Chemic formulas. It will

rather be the places “towards which” her mind goes on its own accord when the

“external show” of our social curriculum out there stops for a while. Suddenly the internal

drama of in here that is constantly accompanying the school day yet left unacknowledged

will become the makings of a “curriculum” that we are not used to considering in such

terms. However, by the very fact that we suddenly incorporate these mindfulness

“interventions” that cannot but make room for such content to arise – we inevitably

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expand the ideas of what counts as a “curriculum”. Here we suddenly encounter a

curriculum that is made ad hoc as a student is asked to attend the present, on purpose and

non-judgmentally as the Kabat-Zinnean definition of mindfulness proposes. Something

will arise – a sound out there, a thought, the sensation of breath - she will attend, and as

she attends that will be the reality of that moment. She will stand face to face with a

curriculum that has not been predetermined by society, a curriculum that may be far

more life-like then anything we normally find in school: a curriculum of our own

unfolding.

This is where the loose ends can begin to be tied. I suggest viewing evidence-

based contemplative curricular “interventions” from the meta-pedagogical attentional

perspective, rather than from the lens of what seems to be their instrumental rhetoric.

Yes, students may be told that contemplative practice can reduce stress, but the moment

to moment experience of practice itself is not about dwelling in “stress reduction”. It is

about attending in here. Policy-makers might go for fMRI images, cortisol levels, blood-

pressure and what you will. These cannot hide a simple fact that

mindfulness/contemplative-based “interventions” are introducing the neglected side of

the attentional T-junction into the curriculum. Following Peters’ claim, their inclusion

within curricular time-slots builds worthwhileness into them, and into the practice of

contemplation. A student that is given proper instructions throughout these

“interventions”, tacitly surmises that in here counts, that “education” is about “me” too, that

exploring the first-person inner-terrain is an educationally worthwhile activity.

The temporal axis

The meta-pedagogical orientation of attention in here or out there is even more

dramatic, albeit more difficult to grasp, when considered through the temporal

perspective. In order to elaborate this claim, consider the very etymology of the term

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“curriculum” derived from the Latin verb currere – to run. “Curriculum” is commonly

conceived as “a course of study” (Pinar & Grumet, 1976). This term immediately embeds

“education” within space and time, as the “curriculum” becomes a planned path that one

is to walk, if not run, along. This idea in a nutshell is depicted as we examine the first

week of school year or university semester in which a student is typically acquainted with

the intended curriculum for the year. The material form of this acquaintance amounts to

a growing pile of books and papers accumulating on a students’ table (or perhaps a

lengthening list of links these days).

Consider the subtle lesson that this pile teaches. It depicts the “curriculum” as a

“normative map” that instills the following lesson: you are standing here and now, but

there is a “better” place to be at which is there and then. A student cannot but assume that

moving from math 1 to math 2, or grammar 5 to grammar 8 brings him or her to a

“better” place. There is a clear logic to such a claim and I am certainly not arguing as to

the practical benefits of math and grammar. Again, it is the hidden meta-pedagogy of

attention that concerns me. The whole idea of the “curriculum” as embodied in the

etymology of the term and in its practice in most schools reveals the consideration of

only one axis of time – the horizontal axis running from past to future. A life or an

education that rests solely within this conception of time creates the sense that meaning

can only be gained by “arriving”, or by “getting somewhere” and that “the educated

person” is one who runs (currere) and gets there - and we might add in our culture - gets

there first. Our attention in school is not only lured out there most of the time, it is also

lured away to then and hardly ever to now. We are educated to assess “where we are at”

solely based on how far along we are on the social “normative map” of the curriculum,

compared to our peers. Do we ever get a chance to just marvel at the fact that we are

here, breathing right now? That at least for a while in here and now, within my body,

without needing to go anywhere, might be a right place and time to be at? If our

22

attention is constantly called to where we ought to go conceived socially as “better” we

are bound to a troubled life. The image of “education” as practiced this way instills in us

the idea that here and now - the only dwelling place that really exists – is somehow flawed,

inferior; in need of betterment. Yet as it seems, we can’t really be anywhere else.

How do we solve the incredible paradox of these two dramatically different

temporal perspectives? Balance is what I would suggest, and I suspect that

contemplative-based curricular interventions, even when rendered instrumentally, are

introducing this perspective for they engage students with a novel meta-pedagogical

orientation at the temporal level. How so? Mindfulness practice, and certainly yogic

postures when practiced appropriately (Ergas, 2013) aspire to teach us to be here now.

By no means are we to fool ourselves by thinking that here and now (the present) is such

a lovely place to be at. I reiterate, there is no romanticism involved here, only reality.

Mindfulness is about realizing that we can’t be anywhere else but here and now. When

seen in this way, our public “curriculum” is revealed as somewhat of an “out-of-body

experience”: it tells us that we live here now, but we really ought to be “there in a future,

then”.

What happens when mindfulness practice is introduced into this scheme? The

time to which students are required to gaze when engaged in mindfulness practice is now.

The content of now is their inner-experience – their breath, sensations, thoughts and other

phenomena that are examined from in here. As noted above, the idea might certainly be

presented to them that the practice is meant to reduce stress or help them focus. Any of

us presented with such idea would habitually transform this into some achievement to be

gained: “why am I not relaxed yet?”; “will this help me get an A in Chemistry?” These are

manifestations of a habituated attention that has been so “well”-trained in a means-ends

linear sense of progress. This will certainly reveal the struggle, yet its solution is built into

the pedagogy – if we practice bringing back our wandering attention to the actual “task”

23

at hand, we will only find a sensation, a breath, or one thought. This meta-pedagogical

orientation challenges the idea of a goal to be achieved, for a goal can only arise based on

the dualism of now and then that appears over the horizontal time axis.

At some point such a shift in our meta-pedagogy might drive home the lesson

that meaning can never exist elsewhere but only in the place where attention rests – in

the moment. At some point when students return to their study books after a meditation

session, they might just begin to discern a more fine-tuned sense of what exactly makes

page 257 in the book different than page 245. Is this a difference that makes a difference,

and if so, where does that meaningful difference lie? It is the page-number, or is it the

attender that has changed?

Some critique and concluding remarks

This paper I hope has opened a way for pragmatically coming to terms with the

dangers and risks involved in the “scientification”, secularization, commercialization and

commodification of contemplative-based curricular “interventions”, focusing mainly on

mindfulness practice as the most common “intervention”. This was done by appealing to

a first-person perspective that grounds education primarily in attention. From this

perspective education is primarily a lived individual experience. Contemplative practices

turn to examine this individual perspective itself. By its inclusion in the curriculum it is

merited worthwhileness, and it contributes to a reconstructed “education” that

introduces the here and now into our curricular practice.

I fully support curricular theorists that want to ensure that we keep studying the

roots of contemplative practice within wisdom-traditions. I, too, can see the

instrumentalism that pervades education and that appropriates these practices to serve

goals that seem to diminish the richness of their origins. Moreover, I also have deep

concerns with referring to contemplative practice as a curricular “intervention” that seeks

24

to come up with the right “dosage”, which makes it sound more like a clinical

experiment then what I think it can be: Education with a capital E. In addition, there are

various challenging practical questions involved here that I have not considered in the

paper. The whole thrust of the claim proposed should be viewed from the stance of

critical pedagogy and the “hidden curriculum” as it applies to the quantity and quality of

time allocated to contemplative practices. If this becomes a ten-minute ritual twice a

week, it might not carry much impact. If it is canceled, “just this week”, due to the need

to prepare for state-exams, there’s a lesson there too. There are issues concerning the

skill of teachers teaching contemplative practice, and many other considerations certainly

apply here. My intention has been to show that even within these limitations and within

the current evidence-based rhetoric, if we start allocating curricular time to activities that

ask students to note their breathing, thoughts, sensations – their inner workings and the

here-ness and now-ness of their existence - we are transforming the social understanding of

“education” and “the educated person”. That science is currently the vehicle that might

be most responsible for bringing such wisdom-tradition orientation to the classroom is

surely a case for awe and wonder.

In the words of Alfred North Whitehead: “There is only one subject-matter for

education, and that is Life in all its manifestations” (1962, p. 10). I am not quite sure he

would agree with my interpretation, but I take this statement to imply that the

manifestations of life are just as much in here as they are out there. From the perspective of

mindfulness as practiced rather than spoken about, we are reconstructing the image of

“education” as we include it in our curriculum even as a “scientific intervention”.

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1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/encinitas-yoga-lawsuit/ 2 The question of “who” exactly is standing at the T-junction of attention, or who is the agent behind the orientation of attention is avoided here. For the purposes of this paper, I suggest that it will suffice to propose the phenomenology of attention as it unfolds without handling such ontological issues.