In certain parts of the United States, it’s getting more and more likely that rather than a game of dodgeball in gym class or a round of Heads-up, Seven-up as a break between lessons, students will instead find themselves doing downward-facing dog. The internet is saturated with yoga-based lesson plans, teacher-training courses, and “mindful” music playlists designed for schools, while programs for certified yoga instructors who want to bring their practice onto campus have also gained popularity.
While up-to-date data on the prevalence of school-based yoga is hard to come by, a 2015 survey led by the New York University psychologist Bethany Butzer identified three dozen programs in the United States that reach 940 schools and more than 5,400 instructors. School-based yoga programs, Butzer and her co-authors concluded, are “acceptable and feasible to implement.” The researchers also predicted that such programs would grow in popularity.
The trend, however, seems to have been accompanied by an uptick in vocal pushback against the idea. In 2016, an elementary school in Cobb County, Georgia, became the subject of heated controversy after introducing a yoga program. Parents’ objections to the yoga classes—on the grounds that they promoted a non-Christian belief system—were vociferous enough to compel the district to significantly curtail the program, removing the “namaste” greeting and the coloring-book exercises involving mandalas. A few years before that, a group of parents sued a San Diego County school district on the grounds that its yoga program promoted Eastern religions and disadvantaged children who opted out. While a judge ruled in favor of the district, the controversy resurfaced two years ago amid concerns that the program was a poor use of public funds in already strapped schools. Meanwhile, just last month the Alabama Board of Education’s long-standing ban on yoga caused some ballyhoo after a document listing it as one of the activities prohibited in “gym class” was recirculated, grabbing the attention of a Hindu activist.
Neuroscience has a lot to learn from Buddhism.
Proponents tend to cite studies underscoring the benefits of mindfulness-based therapies such as yoga for kids’ development. A 2009 study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, for example, found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which teaches children how to divorce themselves from harmful thoughts or emotions, was linked to reduced anxiety and increased attention levels. Other studies suggest that “mindful movement” such as yoga helps to enhance kids’ executive functions—skills such as working memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility. Some studies have gone as far as concluding that yoga has a positive effect on students’ academic performance or engagement, particularly among students who’ve struggled with traumatic experiences such as poverty and struggle with self-regulation as a result. After all, decades of research have shown that it’s hard for a child who hasn’t learned how to respond to stress to do well in school.
But some observers question the research on yoga’s benefits. Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who specializes in social-welfare policy, in a 2016 Atlantic story criticized some existing studies on yoga and mindfulness as being of “low quality and dubious rigor.” Julia Belluz, a senior health correspondent for Vox, has noted that despite a drastic increase in recent decades in the number of studies on yoga, the research tends to rely on small numbers of participants and imperfect comparisons, among other limitations. And some parents argue that yoga’s potential benefits aren’t enough to justify the spending at a time when public schools already struggle with The most vocal opponents tend to cite yoga’s Hindu and Buddhist roots, arguing that the line between those origins and secular practices is often blurry.
