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Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

nytimes.com

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Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#51

Post by fooblat »

lm28469 wrote: post #43
fooblat wrote: post #31

I really struggle with the term "mindfulness" as it seems it can mean anything and everything, depending on who you ask. We had some Mindfulness workshops at a previous employer and it was so full of woo and magical thinking that it really turned me off and felt like a huge waste of time. My current company also recently introduced a Mindfulness workshop only this time it was really a basic meditation workshop which…

> My current company also recently introduced a Mindfulness workshop only this time it was really a basic meditation workshop which I enjoyed. I find it extremely weird for companies to offer these things. The only reason they'd do it is to boost their own productivity / margin / whatever. As in "be healthy because we need your ass on that chair and your brain working on our problems". There is already a thin enough…

In both cases, it was pitched as a way to be more focused, purposeful, and satisfied at work.

In general, I think it makes sense for companies to promote activities that they believe will help employees to be happy and healthy. Happy workers are generally more productive.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#52

Post by gls2ro »

mapcars wrote: post #2

>“Children will start to be introduced gradually to issues around mental health, well-being and happiness right from the start of primary school,” he added. Why wouldn't adults just solve their mental problems instead of introducing them to children? Children have no problems with happiness or well-being. It's us who should learn from them. big facepalm

I think your hypothesis here is that the mental health issues, unhappiness and issues with well-being can be fixed completly from the society.

I disagree with it. I prefer to look at them somehow like I see bugs: they cannot be - in general - eliminated completely. They come with the process of people building products.

So I don't think we can solve those completely. This is why I think we should start educating children about how to think about live.

Maybe an inspiration from philosophy stage from Ancient time which originally I think was concerned (at least some of them) with how a life should be lived, what happiness means, what does it mean to be a homo sapiens ...

I think we should approach this as a society and start offering children tools about how to approach this.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#53

Post by michaelt »

dTal wrote: post #21
mapcars wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience kids, until a certain age, run around, scream, shout, full of excitement, happiness, and life. But once they start looking at adults - all they see only dark, gloomy, lifeless serious faces and so they start becoming the same. If adults want to do something about it - we should teach happiness ourselves first. Kids will follow automagically.

Are you suggesting we shouldn't teach mindfulness to children? That it's not a useful skill? That the time would be wasted? >“It’s not just to make them feel better in the short-term,” Dr. Deighton said, “but to better equip them for later in life.”

Mindfulness is branded wrong.

Sceptics see it as (a) Some yoga-style mystic silliness reasonable people have been ignoring for decades, and (b) A 2014 self-help book, a fad-prone genre with relatively little credibility.

If the common sense ideas underlying mindfulness were given a different coat of paint, they might be more readily accepted.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#54

Post by mapcars »

fiala__ wrote: post #25
mapcars wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience kids, until a certain age, run around, scream, shout, full of excitement, happiness, and life. But once they start looking at adults - all they see only dark, gloomy, lifeless serious faces and so they start becoming the same. If adults want to do something about it - we should teach happiness ourselves first. Kids will follow automagically.

If you've never seen a depressed child then I beg you to pay attention. Children have incredibly complex, fascinating and perceptive minds, they aren't just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty. It's exactly this kind of reductionism which leads parents to ignore their children's psychological needs, which leads to schools having to take action.

>just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty

I did not say that. As I don't think that imposing complexity of mental bullshit from adult's minds on children makes things any better.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#55

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

stared wrote: post #45

I think schools should teach one more thing: non-violent communication and related things: not-neediness, how to communicate feelings and needs, how to avoid shaming and guilt-tripping, how to ask and be fine with rejections, how to understand that other people may have different goals and motivations, etc. - Marshall B. Rosenberg, "Non-Violent Communication" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560861.Non_Violent_Com…

If we start the "what else" branch, it's almost infinite.

For example, the ways to manipulate people and how to protect oneself (e.g. according to Cialdini's classification, but not necessarily).

How to develop critical thinking in a world where most communication is aimed at influencing you in one way or another.

How to develop elasticity and the skill to adapt to ever-changing circumstances (hint: the world they will be living in will be very different from the one they're taught about at school, I think we all experienced it at some point).

How to understand the conditioning of the society and the culture we're living in (e.g. the roles of the husband/wife, parent/child, family member, colleague, boss) and learn to live with them without getting too serious about them (and save a few bucks on psychotherapy later).

How to save money. Only those few who care about you will teach you how to save money, everyone else wants you to spend your money. Etc. etc.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#56

Post by mapcars »

ionised wrote: post #19
mapcars wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Besides, depression and anxiety is surprisingly common among children. Whom do you think they learned this from? Trees or cats?

You are asserting that depression is a learned behaviour?

Not that it can not happen by itself, it's just seeing it around inclines you towards it.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#57

Post by baybal2 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #24
mapcars wrote: post #2

>“Children will start to be introduced gradually to issues around mental health, well-being and happiness right from the start of primary school,” he added. Why wouldn't adults just solve their mental problems instead of introducing them to children? Children have no problems with happiness or well-being. It's us who should learn from them. big facepalm

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being. This seems rather naive to me. Unhappiness is far from absent from the lives of many children and young people, and social media is making it worse. See yesterday's yougov survey results that indicate that "18% of young people in UK do not think life is worth living" [1]. This new curriculum subject is about helping children to understand and navigate their ow…

I spent most of my early childhood in a grimiest, gloomiest, dying city on Russian/Chinese border. From the age of 12 or so, I lived with one goal - get out of there. I had no time for stupid psychologising, nor could've imagined anybody living in glitzy cities of the West to be so dumb to waste time on that.

There were times I almost worshipped that imaginary version of Western culture I had with it being all about action, forward movement and unending progress. Once I finally got myself out of Russia, I was up for a big, big surprise... West had idleness as its second nature...

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#58

Post by mapcars »

icebraining wrote: post #22
mapcars wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>many people (myself included) don't learn early on that feeling sad or overwhelmed is normal and ok Until someone told you what is normal and what is not you have no problems doing something. So it's not about being sad is ok, it's about not judging at all.

Yes, in an utopia, this class may be useless.

There are still many places on a planet where kids are not burdened by depression and sadness. It happens to them as well, of course, but not in any extraordinary amounts.

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#59

Post by mercer »

mapcars wrote: post #37
dTal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting we shouldn't teach mindfulness to children? That it's not a useful skill? That the time would be wasted? >“It’s not just to make them feel better in the short-term,” Dr. Deighton said, “but to better equip them for later in life.”

I think if needed it can be learned later, I don't see any problem with that. I started being interested in meditation around 23 when I was on the very bottom of my emotional state. But I see that most people around me never experienced this and for them, meditation and yoga is an exotic exercise. One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add…

> One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class.

Being perpetually 'busy' and treating life as a collection of planned activities, like homework, classes, courses, workshops, appointments, etc. is something that runs deep in our entire (Western?) society, whether school-going or working age.

Mindfulness as yet another one of those activities feels uncomfortably like a band-aid solution that is dangerous precisely because it works.

It's a bit like taking aspirin to deal with headaches when really you should just stop drinking so much coffee and working so much.

I do think mindfulness can be more than that. I've experienced how beneficial it can be to make it part of life rather than just (or only) another planned activity, especially when it's a part or underpinning of a larger 'framework' (in my case I lean towards Zen Buddhism).

Re: Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness

#60

Post by mapcars »

icebraining wrote: post #13
mapcars wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Besides, depression and anxiety is surprisingly common among children. Whom do you think they learned this from? Trees or cats?

Even assuming depression must be "learned", what does it matter? School can't make sure they're never around depressed people. But it can help them protect themselves from it.

You will meet all kinds of people that's true, but it worth decreasing the amount.
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