Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools

“What’s the harm in having kids do mindfulness meditation or sun salutations in homeroom? . . . Like many of us, Brown believed that these were secular applications until she examined the historical and religious context for herself. This book is a thorough history of mindfulness and yoga in public schools, related court cases, and legal analysis that led Brown to advocate an opt-in model as a way to maintain the separation of church and state.”—Tricycle

“Pivotal and revealing. . . . Brown is insistent on the importance of empirical findings and her descriptions of yoga and mindfulness are all evidence-based and factual.”— Oxford University Press Journals: Journal of Church and State

“Brown has extensively researched all facets of this topic and lays the evidence out for readers in a manner that is clear and easy to follow.”—International Journal of Christianity & Education

“In this provocative new book . . . Brown argues that a new concerted effort to reestablish religion in public schools comes not from Catholics or evangelicals, but from advocates of yoga and mindfulness. . . . Brown has written an important work of publicly engaged scholarship that documents how some advocates of mindfulness and yoga are using schools to disseminate religious traditions.”—Reading Religion

“Brown discusses yoga and meditation in US public schools, but in the process, she reveals so much more. She covers the origins of yoga and mindfulness, discusses how those have evolved and were introduced to public schools in the United States, and the lawsuits against them. . . . Because of its wide-ranging coverage, Brown’s book has much to offer for scholars in a number of fields.”—Religious Studies Review

“The massive popularization of yoga and mindfulness in the United States has extended into the nation’s public schools, and cultivating those practices in the classroom has raised a series of complex establishment clause questions—just as prayer and Bible reading did in the 1950s and 1960s. No one has explored those complexities more fully and carefully than Brown does here. It is no easy task to untangle the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ in contemporary forms of yoga and mindfulness meditation, but Brown offers a comprehensive, analytically rigorous account with an eye toward practical insights for parents, judges, educators, and religious practitioners. The case she makes for greater transparency and public scrutiny is compelling—and will generate a lot of lively debate.”—Leigh E. Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis

“In a nice blend of academic theorizing and real-life courtroom experience, Candy Brown questions the rise of yoga and mindfulness programs in public schools under the assumption that they are secular, and from that offers reflections on the nature of the secular-religious divide itself. The book demonstrates, in painstaking detail, how these programs are portrayed to the public-school-attending public as secular, curricular, and scientific, despite having religious origins and modern religious practitioners.”—Christopher C. Lund, Wayne State University