Why mindfulness in schools does not work
A large and rigorous study1 has examined the efficacy of mindfulness interventions in UK schools and has concluded that, contrary to expectations, they failed to improve the mental health of the students, aged 11-16. It was an impressive project, which « spanned over eight years, from 2015 to 2023, and involved more than 28,000 students, 650 teachers, 100 schools and 20 million data points. »2
Is it a puzzling result ? If we believe mindfulness to be formative and to bring tranquility to its practitioners, should we be surprised by this?
I just read an article that sheds a lot of light on that issue, in my opinion. I’d like to share that good work, and to talk a bit about how it resonates with my own research on the matter. The bottom line is this : if this study should be pivotal, it is in that it should act as a magnifying glass that reveals all the flaws of an inadequate way of conceptualizing mindfulness.
The amazing article in question is called « Beyond All Splits: Envisioning the Next Generation of Science on Mindfulness and Compassion in Schools for Students »3. It provides a very helpful summary of the critiques of the dominant scientific way of conceiving mindfulness. Those critiques come from different background : « philosophy of education, contemplative studies, and philosophy of science perspectives »4 But they converge to tell a pretty unified story.
In 2019, Ergas and Hadar were publishing an article called « Mindfulness in and as education: A map of a developing academic discourse from 2002 to 2017 »5. As the title suggests, there are two types of discourses about school-based mindfulness. You are either talking about Mindfulness in education or Mindfulness as education. Mindfulness in education is the dominant discourse about the topic, and the problem with it is that its assumptions rob mindfulness of its potential.
« Mindfulness in education » describes mindfulness as a therapeutic intervention that takes place in school but that is being launched from the outside. It leaves the organization of the school utterly intact but, like a precise surgical strike, it tries to bring about a desired effect. The desired effect is conceptualized as an effect on the individual, who grapples in the privacy of their own mind with mindfulness as it is described in the manual, and relayed by the teacher. This view is often connected to the conception that makes of mindfulness simply a brain exercise. Nothing more.
The large and rigorous study that we are talking about exemplifies that approach. The fact that they tried it is not without merit, but the failure of the interventions to bring about the desired effects, is here to teach us that the approach and its assumptions were all wrong. Not that mindfulness is without educational value.
What is wrong with this approach and its assumptions ? In short, it does not contend with the fact that mindfulness is a social practice. Contrast it with the discourse of “Mindfulness as education”, which has the merit of focusing on the social transmission and the social transformation that flows from mindfulness.
« Mindfulness as education carries a more profound transformative educational potential relying more on the practice’s origins and integrated through contemplative pedagogy and some more holistic models with process-oriented aims »6 We are no longer talking about a model where an individual, targeted as such, gets the opportunity to train their brain for a very personal gain. We are talking about a model where mindfulness changes the culture of the school it interacts with, by bringing relevant philosophical ideas to the fore. It is fully integrated into the curriculum, as opposed to being extra-curricular. It contends with the philosophical import of the practice, by not filing the serial numbers off of it, by not ignoring its context of origin. It focuses on the relationship between the mentor and the student, and on the pedagogical relationship they share, for the sake of long term development. « Here, we conceptualize mindfulness not only as a social practice, but an intergenerational, pedagogical, and developmentally-attuned social practice. »7
Are we blasting mindfulness at people or are we truly teaching them to be mindful? If we want the latter, our willingness to take the overall ecology of the school as a primary unit of analysis is crucial8. It is probably the same difference between learning random facts by heart, and learning virtue by example.
Here’s how I would present similar ideas in my own words:
“Mindfulness in education” robs mindfulness meditation of its potential as a philosophical exercise because it does not allow for it do be deployed as a philosophical exercise. Such a deployment would require an environment conducive to the practice, and it is only the “Minfulness as education” view that is able to articulate that and aim for it. In the introduction to this blog, I have insisted on the fact that playfulness is the appropriate mood that should fill the air around those exercises. I worry a lot that techniques meant to deal with, let’s say, homework-related stress, will just be added to the pile of homework, so to speak. The authors of this article insist on the fact that compassion is key to the deployment of mindfulness. Perhaps our ideas are not so different there.
To keep putting things in my own words, I would like to make a distinction between the structure of the philosophical exercise and the attitude that it makes you adopt as you go through it. I worry that there is often a lot of confusion on this point. There is two views of mindfulness that I find interesting. The “bare attention” view, that describes mindfulness as this quality of attention that strips your perception of all its judgy-ness, and gets you in touch with what is “simply there”. And what I would call the “hermeneutic” view of mindfulness, that describes how it makes you interpret phenomena in a wiser way than usual, recalling the relevant philosophical ideas at the right moment, and thus being a better judge of your experience thanks to that helpful theory. I feel like the “bare attention” view is a good description of the mindful attitude, but it is in no way a helpful pedagogy of how to be mindful. “Simply notice what is there” is not a sufficient instruction, unless the context provides clues that help the student understand what is being gestured at.
The hermeneutic view is a way better description of all that is needed to get the bare attention attitude off the ground in the first place. Mindfulness, as a philosophical exercise, is an hermeneutic exercise, which invites us to interpret phenomena, and which you have to be initiated into in order to even get the point of. Its practitioners can adopt an attitude of “bare attention” only if this entire support system is in place. Bare attention for the practitioner is the goal of the designer of the exercise, not the way to design it, and thus it cannot justify minimalistic pedagogy.
It seems to me that “mindfulness in education” relies on bare attention phenomenology and on minimalistic pedagogy. Whereas “mindfulness as education” takes seriously the hermeneutic nature of mindfulness. That being said, I find myself often alone in talking about “mindfulness meditation” instead of just “mindfulness”, and so there might still be work to be done to conceptualize it as an exercise, and not as a virtue. In addition, perhaps my take on it would salvage some of the individualism of the current approach, and allow us to describe how mindfulness is not simply synonymous with compassionately decreasing the workload of students, for instance. That said, it might explain why we can’t learn mindfulness without having done that first.
Pierrick Simon
02/09/2023
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
Notes:
1 https://myriadproject.org/
2 https://wellcome.org/news/mindfulness-schools-doesnt-improve-mental-health-heres-why-thats-positive (accessed on 03/08/2023)
3 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365321521_Beyond_All_Splits_Envisioning_the_Next_Generation_of_Science_on_Mindfulness_and_Compassion_in_Schools_for_Students ; DOI:10.1007/s12671-022-02017-z ; Authors ; Robert W. Roeser · Mark T. Greenberg · Tyralynn Frazier · Brian M. Galla · Andrei D. Semenov · Michael T. Warren
4 « Beyond All Splits... » P.244.
6 Ergas, Hadar, p.789.
7 Roeser, Greenberg, etc. « Beyond All Splits: Envisioning the Next Generation of Science on Mindfulness and Compassion in Schools for Students. » p.247.
8 “Beyond all splits.” p.248.
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