Imagine what our world might be like if everyday every child in every school, meditated on arrival at school for 30 minutes and for 30 minutes before they left.
A way to center themselves and prepare for their day at school and then again at the end of the day as they prepare to leave their protected school environment and take a healthy attitude back out into the world.
Imagine if they did this from when they started at pre-school, through early schooling and all the way until they left high school.
Not a meditation that preached any religious view or doctrine, but the simple form of meditation where you reach back into the calm and centred being that you are. A simple non denominational meditation that brings the doer to that quiet place inside.
I wonder what impact this would have on:
- learning and mental development
- bullying
- cliques and gangs
- ego centric age development
- violence in the school yard
- separation and exclusion
It seems to me that we have all these strategies for handling the things that go wrong at schools and in our youth, where we penalise and punish in the hope of getting conformity and compliance. We are happy to be punitive and marginalise those who breach the desired results but we aren’t introducing any ‘better models’ that provide lasting change and uplift and support our youth.
The current discipline models in schools are based around older punitive and autocratic rule styles with the more severe punishments/ like caning, removed.
In an aim to be more progressive we seem to expend money in ever growing amounts on police in schools, chaplains and other programs that are aimed at either pushing a particular agenda or treating the symptoms rather than the causes.
Imagine that young children without negative outside influences could sense their own inner beauty and strengths, and band together to uplift each other rather than bring down and denigrate. Imagine them taking that back out with them into the world. Imagine that after 10 years, 15 years where a whole generation knew nothing else, what sort of future we might be creating.
There are many things that could and probably should be changed in the education system, but it seems that what is missing most is our ability to fix the life skills that can modify our future. We have a place to make those changes over a prolonged period, our schools.
Little things, that could change our world. This is true life hacking. This is a “disruption” that our world needs versus some other fancy mobile app.
We have everything we need to do this already, except the will of the people.
Imagine if…
There is a great site / app ( http://smilingmind.com.au ) helping young people discover mindfullness meditation which features age appropriate courses. One of their goals is to add this to the Australian Curriculum by 2020.