Students in very stressful home environments as well as all other students might benefit from training that gives them optimum access to their brains and intellectual potentials. There are some schools, public and private, that are piloting some very innovative relaxation and "Quiet Time" approaches. This unit hopes to provide a curriculum that could be used in the public schools for the benefit of all children. The main focus here will be on the Progressive School of Long Island, though two other programs will be discussed.
The Transcendental Meditation (TM) meditation technique has been available to adults for the past 30 years in the United States of America. There has recently been a movement for applying the meditation technique to children in educational settings. The National Center for Consciousness-Based Education is now training teachers to train students in the TM meditation technique. Numerous studies (e.g., Elias and Wilson, 1994) have cited the positive effects of TM meditation. There is a new movement to bring this technique to public school students. So far, no formal studies have been done to measure the effects. Dr George Ruthoford first introduced the TM program at Fletcher-Johnson School in Washington D.C. five years ago to help reduce the stress of inner city students. He is quoted in the latest Consciousness-Based Education pamphlet as saying "We had amazing results. I used to have to be in the streets all the time to stop the fighting but after starting the TM program, I didn't have to go out there. You walk into the school and you feel it's tension-free, a stress-free school right in the heart of the inner city, right around where we had plenty of violence." He has since started a similar program in Baltimore. He began by training a small number of teachers and then expanded the program to the whole school population. There are limits to testimonials and there is a need for blinded outcome studies with reliable measurement techniques in this area, but this type of result is nonetheless very encouraging.
At Harvard University, since the late 1960's the Mind/Body Institute has been studying the effect of the relaxation response on adults in all types of ways. The effect this response has on the brain is cited earlier. They have started reaching out to middle and high school students with their techniques. One such program has been piloted at Horace Mann Middle School in Los Angeles, California. Benson (2000) and his team have studied the effects of their program on academic achievement with middle school students with positive results. The program targeted an inner city school with an economically disadvantaged population. The teachers and students were trained in the relaxation technique, which consisted of a breathing and imagery exercise. The study lasted three years and measured students' academic performance, work habits and cooperation. Students who had two or more exposures to the training in school had an increase in Grade Point Average (GPA), work habits and cooperation between 1995 and 1996. There was a significant group-by-time interaction in GPA. Work habit results were similar with a highly significant group-by-time interaction. Both these findings show that there is increased benefit with longer exposure and practice with the technique. Moreover, cooperation significantly increased among the students. One of the important aspects discussed was the importance of many exposures to the training and the technique practiced over a long period of time. The Education department of the Mind/Body Institute has now held training sessions in seventeen public schools in cities and towns in Massachusetts (including Boston) and eight cities and towns five other states including California.
Being taught just stress reduction might not be really palatable to all young children. They may not want to be reminded of the stress and fear and loneliness in their lives. This unit hypothesizes that the way to help children to relax and use their whole selves is through a "Quiet Time" that not only gives them a technique to reduce stress, but is positive, and gets them back in touch with feeling peaceful and loved. Children can relate to love, yearn for it, and search for it. When children are joyful and at peace, perhaps their brain chemistry is at the optimal, and they may be able to learn closer to their full capacity.
Neo Humanist Education, an international network of schools, incorporates this approach into its curriculum. At Europe's Neo Humanist Education Conference, summer 2000, teaching love was discussed. Referenced from notes from this Conference, Madhavi Mertz, the Directress of a kindergarten in Holland, talked about teaching universal love as a natural process. She said that as educators, what they are doing is bringing out the love that is already there within each child. Most children are loved and cared for first at home. She discussed some approaches that help to enrich that experience, including instilling the spirit of social service, teaching yoga and "Quiet Time" meditation, the loving example of the teacher, character building concepts such as forgiveness, and teaching the children the sense of one universal family as well as others.
The Progressive School of Long Island, a K-7 school, uses a " Quiet Time" approach in which children are taught stretching, yoga body exercises and songs with themes of peace, kindness to all living things, love, and our connection to the entire world and beyond. The founder and director, Eric Jacobson, developed the program based on the Neo-Humanist Education philosophy of P.R. Sarkar. The students start their "Quiet Time" with simple stretching and yoga exercises. The students are taught simple songs that incorporate themes of love, peace, and their connection with their world outside and inside. The songs incorporate the use of a mantra with the meaning "love is all there is." They are lead into a simple meditation technique that is developmentally appropriate. Students in higher-grade levels write their own songs and learn a more complex meditation. The students also have extension activities throughout their curriculum. The literature program is a reading, discussion, and writing program in which stories are picked with themes of peace, service, love, universalism, ecology and social justice.
There are many aspects to the program. One such unique aspect is Jacobson's (2001) program of "applied learning". The goal of this program is to apply acquired academic skills and concepts into "real life" situations. The program has three phases. At the K/1 level the students are exposed to a variety of activities and careful observation is made of their interests and talents. They call it "free time." In grades 2 and 3, students are encouraged to pursue their interests after work is completed through "enrichments". In grades 4 and above, students design their own projects called "electives". Some examples of electives are adopting a school in Santo Domingo, a school radio station, adopting and cleaning up a local park or stream, running a business whose profits help others, and participating in a bus conflict resolution committee. In the seventh grade they offer an expanded program including community apprenticeships and independent study courses. The students at the school are highly successful and boast the highest scores on standardized tests given to all private schools on Long Island, NY.
The formal research using these "Quiet Time" methods is in its infancy and consists of several master's theses at Chiangmai University in Taiwan. In one study, N. Thaweepkul (1999) looks at the effect of neo-humanist meditation and visualization practices on the thinking processes of preschool children. She finds that the children with the meditation and visualization training had higher creative thinking development with fluency and originality and also elaboration. N. Niyomka (1999) compares the academic achievement and study-related anxiety of the students who were trained by Neo-Humanism's Alpha State Motivation technique. She found that academic achievement of an experimental group of students increases significantly at p 0.01 level of statistical significance. Clearly, much more research needs to be done in order to determine what benefit and effect on learning this technique has on children.