Yoga is either religious instruction or the “wussification of America.”

At least that’s what two stories I ran into this week are saying.

First, there’s a Fox News story that I came across via Media Matters in which the fine folks at Fox & Friends discuss the new “trend” of children practicing yoga with guest and parenting guru (no pun intended) Larry Winget. The whole segment is based around a frame of “yoga vs. sports.” While he initially praises the benefits of yoga (in order to satiate the “yoga nazis”-now there’s an image), the segment devolves into Winget lecturing the audience on why yoga isn’t a sport-it doesn’t have a ball, you can’t win or lose, you don’t keep score.  The lowest part comes when Winget tries to link children doing the downward dog with the “wussification” of America.

Sports, according to Winget, has a character building value because it teaches winning and losing and is interactive and social. Yoga, on the other hand, does not teach a child how to compete or socialize with others, but instead, is an individual and isolating practice. This distinction is not new. Americans have long imagined yoga as an isolated practice. Some saw this positively, such as Thoreau. Meanwhile, 18th and 19th century European accounts of the “Hindoo fakir” that circulated in America imagined yoga as the individual practice of heathen holy men. For more on this see Kirin Narayan’s excellent article “Refractions from the Field at Home: American Representations of Hindu Holy Men in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 476–509.

Now neither Thoreau’s yoga at Walden Pond nor evangelical missionary reports looked anything like preschoolers striking warrior pose, but the discourse of Western social activity, capitalist competition, and work ethic contrasted with Eastern isolation, asceticism, and navel gazing is embedded in our thinking about yoga today. Yoga is “wussification” insofar as it replaces the aggressive, communal, and competitive sports with its individual navel gazing and austere, individualized, and quietest practice.  I also thought there were hints of an almost Robert Bellah-like argument against “sports Sheilaism,” for lack of a better term. If this yoga trend (is it really a trend?) keeps up we may see the downfall of our treasured social-sport institutions. We might all become “exercisers but not athletes.” The rise of the athletic “nones.” Little Leagues and Pop Warners will crumble. I’m being tongue-in-cheek, but I think this story does get to the role of sports in American culture and the major apologetic for child sports, that they build character and teach life lessons.

But what if yoga taught character and life lessons? Over at NPR a story from Encinitas, California does just that. The K. P. Jois Foundation, an Ashtanga yoga group, supports wellness program in the school district there that gets elementary students to hit the yoga mats. But at least one parent objects to the yoga classes, claiming that they are an establishment of religion.

“They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercises,” she says.

Those looked like religious teachings to her, so she opted to keep her son out of the classes. The more Eady reads about the Jois Foundation and its founders’ beliefs in the spiritual benefits of Ashtanga yoga, the more she’s convinced that the poses and meditation can’t be separated from their Hindu roots.

“It’s stated in the curriculum that it’s meant to shape the way that they view the world, it’s meant to shape the way that they make life decisions,” Eady says. “It’s meant to shape the way that they regulate their emotions and the way that they view themselves.”

For their part, the Jois Foundation maintains that the program teaches character, not religion.

Jois Foundation Director Eugene Ruffin, however, maintains that the yoga program is typical of athletics programs for kids.

“They provide you with the exercise and the motivation for children,” Ruffin says. “And then they give you character exercises — ‘Thou shalt not steal, thou shall be honest, thou shall be respectful to adults.’ “

Ruffin says those ideals aren’t specific to Hinduism and don’t conflict with his own Catholic upbringing.

Apparently those character exercises are in King James English. Here yoga is lauded for teaching life lessons on the one hand, and derided for doing so too well, on the other. Note the divergent definitions of religion between Ruffin, the yoga apologist and Eady, the parent. For Eady yoga is religious because it teaches them how to make life decisions and how to make meaning in the world. Ruffin counters both Eady and even Winget by claiming that yoga is like sports. It builds character. It teaches life lessons.

And so now we are back where we started: life lessons. Both of these stories highlight the question of how best to instill “character” in our children. This is a long standing question that goes back to nineteenth century school reformers like Noah Webster and Horace Mann. These Protestant educators sought to instill virtue, what we might now call “life lessons,” into children and thought this could only be done with a non-sectarian Protestant education. Now, in the plural 21st century, educators are still wrestling with the question of how to instill character and virtue in young hearts and minds, but instead of the King James Bible and the Lord’s Prayer they are turning to yoga mats.

What are the kids getting out of all of this yoga? A deeper knowledge of Hinduism?

“Absolutely not — no. What my daughter tells me is she did the pancake today and she lays down and then she cracks up because it’s so funny,” Cocco says.

Ah yes, Patanjali’s infamous pancake asana.


The Education Investment, Citizenship, and the Perfection of Society and Government; Or, What Noah Webster Would Say to Romney and Obama

Lately I’ve been working a side project, a lengthy encyclopedia article on religion and education in America. I’m taking a historical approach in the article and laying out a basic narrative: building a Protestant educational establishment, challenges to that establishment, and, finally, Protestant educational disestablishment. With that article in the back of my head, it has been interesting to listen to the ways Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have approached questions of education during this election. For the most part the candidates and political reporters have focused on the differences between the two. For example, this comes from the Washington Post:

President Obama and Mitt Romney agree that improving schools and providing more training is one of the keys to restoring America’s economic prowess. But their views diverge over what’s holding the country back. Obama says it’s inadequate investment. Romney says it’s the teachers unions and cumbersome bureaucracy.

In their basic stump speeches, both Romney and Obama include education among their five-point plans to turn around the economy. Obama spends more time talking about Pell grants and student assistance because he’s eager to fire up enthusiasm among young voters, who were a key to his victory four years ago. Romney emphasizes conservative themes of school choice to fire up his base.

You can check out the Obama and Romney campaign pages on education for more details on the differences between the candidates. But what is striking to me, as someone who has been thinking about the history of education in America lately, is what both men share in common. They both put education in economic terms. The goal is to make good on an investment. Obama’s site explains how the president wants to invest in community colleges to ensure folks can find good jobs. Romney wants to ensure students find jobs when they graduate so they can get a return on their investment.

Compare this with Noah Webster’s view of the purpose of education (1790):

Every small district should be furnished with a school, at least four months in a year; when boys are not otherwise employed. This school should be kept by the most reputable and well informed man in the district. Here children should be taught the usual branches of learning; submission to superiors and to laws; the moral or social duties; the history and transactions of their own country; the principles of liberty and government. Here the rough manners of the wilderness should be softened, and the principles of virtue and good behaviour inculcated. The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.

Such a general system of education is neither impracticable nor difficult; and excepting the formation of a federal government that shall be efficient and permanent, it demands the first attention of American patriots. Until such a system shall be adopted and pursued; until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than in loping its excressences, after it has been neglected; until Legislators discover that the only way to make good citizens and subjects, is to nourish them from infancy; and until parents shall be convinced that the worst of men are not the proper teachers to make the best; mankind cannot know to what a degree of perfection society and government may be carried. America affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment, and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.

What a difference. “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities”-so much for those community colleges and returns on investment. It’s all about your virtue and how your virtue shapes society, not the market. As Webster saw it, the goal of education was to produce fully-fledged citizens. In his time that meant Protestant citizens, hence the need for the Statesman and Divine to work together. But what about for our time? What would “good citizens” nourished form infancy look like now? This is the important educational question of our time, as I see it. Because, as Webster says, a system of schools can produce an unknown “degree of perfection” in society and government.

For a long period in American history the goal of education was the production of proper citizens. What made a citizen proper varied over time and was a source of dispute. Protestant educational reformers sought to inculcate a non-specific Protestantism, to borrow a phrase from Tracy Fessenden, in students. Catholics pushed back. Many non-whites found the Protestant educational establishment thrust upon them. But even with the insidious and systematic power of cultural assimilation and Protestantization, American education aimed at social, civic, and cultural goals.

This election is about the economy, stupid, and so I understand why education has become a line in our national investment portfolio. But that portfolio is worthless in the hands of an atrophied civil society.


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