Are we teaching our children to be well?
Exploring the path of the student in school, in yoga, and in life.
Though at first read this essay may not seem to have anything to do with yoga, women, or wellbeing, I want to introduce/remind you of the jnana yoga tradition. In this path the practice of yoga is about meditation, self-reflection, and studying the scriptures (such as the Yoga Sutra). There are parts of this path that I very much resonate with. I love studying the ancient texts, teaching the ancient texts, and reflecting on how they translate to my life today (even though they weren’t written for an American white woman in 2024). Yoga is not, and has never been, exclusively about poses. Reflecting on wisdom from the past and how it fits in—or doesn’t—with the realities of today is just as much a part of yoga practice as Downward Facing Dog. So with that, enjoy this deep exploration of what it means to be a student—at yoga, at school, and at life—and the ultimate goal of learning.
I remember being very clear in my convictions as a child. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. As middle school morphed into high school and the realties of career counselors and college admissions approached, I heard a common refrain: “Being an author isn’t a job.” Or more bluntly: “You can’t.” I very quickly learned that you can only be what you want to be when you grow up if it pays well.
Career books were shoved at me and I mindlessly gamed the quizzes. (I can’t be the only teen who quickly figured out how to answer quiz questions to get the answers I wanted via the fabulous training provided by Cosmopolitan.) When I looked at the qualifying temperaments and ideal motivations for people who enjoyed or were successful at the jobs I was destined for based on my manipulated quiz results, I didn’t fit the molds. Journalist sounded good and would allow me to tap my passion for writing, but possessing an overzealous passion for digging out the truth and holding the bad guys to account didn’t resonate. (It turns out I am really interested in the Truth, but not the kind that journalists chase after). Because I didn’t know any better, I dragged myself to my journalism classes in college anyway and listened to my big-name adjunct professors recount their battle stories meant to impress. But I couldn’t help thinking that the last thing I wanted to do was get a call at 3am to go cover a mine collapse. I quickly figured out journalism, at least the breaking news reporting part of it, was not something I wanted to do, if only because it sounded like I wouldn’t get much sleep.
But then what? I wanted to write. I just couldn’t figure out how to make it a job that the rest of society (read: my parents) would deem “suitable.”
There were many times when I lamented that being a student couldn’t be a job. I’d be fantastic at that. I love learning. I changed my major concentration from general journalism to media studies—I was more interested in studying the media than reporting on war. I added a double major in English literature—truthfully because I was bored and also because I needed to declare an English Literature major to apply for the creative writing program, which I was rejected from.
In hindsight, my foray into and unforeseen love affair with yoga around this time isn’t surprising. I was grasping for answers and pathways and Yoga provides endless opportunities to study and learn. Being a student of yoga is all about learning about yourself (there’s that Truth I needed to dig out). I unexpectedly discovered a love of teaching through yoga, though I begrudgingly admit it’s a natural fit. On the last day of my senior year in high school my English teacher predicted that I would become a teacher. I scoffed at the idea at the time, but she saw in me what I couldn’t see in myself—an endless love for learning and sharing information. Because I was always told “teacher” doesn’t pay well, I think I nixed it as a career possibility.
In one of my many yoga teacher training courses I was introduced to this Sankalpa—an intention that is meant to be a deep life-long desire, not just a throw-away intention for the day:
I am a student of my body.
To be a student of your body means that you’re paying attention to how what you do makes you feel. This Sankalpa resonates with me because I’ve always been very sensitive to my health and I’ve made many a life choice based solely on how it would make me feel or how high the percentage was that I’d get sick. I’m one of those people who hates being sick. I know, I know, no one likes being sick. But I HATE being sick. Though my body has provided me endless opportunities to listen and learn through the years, I’ve still managed to ignore most of its signals to my own detriment. Hey, I’m still learning.
Alas, being a lifelong learner—of your body, your mind, or of any subject—is not a salaried career (at least not one that I’ve found). In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I end up paying a lot of money to learn. Learning serves as my escape from the world, an excuse not to work. If I just learn a little more, I’ll be more qualified to finally do something with that learning that will pay the big bucks. Except you can never know it all and so in the quest for perfect knowledge acquisition, I end up always falling short and needing “more.” In essence, I’ve made studentship my crutch and refused, due to my own fear of failure, to conscientiously apply my learning for the benefit of “societal success.” Except I’ve also eschewed society’s definition of success and so I’m constantly oscillating between wanting to profit off my learning and just wanting to be a learner. I’ve learned a lot as a student of yoga and of life, but it hasn’t provided me a salary worth writing home about. In that sense, I’m an epic failure.
The history of being a student
In his book The Student: A Short History, author and Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth writes about three different models of historical studentship before analyzing the current landscape of what it means to be a student. In the first model of studentship, Confucius taught his students how to be model humans within the traditions of his time. In the second model, Socrates taught his students to be model citizens through the device of questioning in order to improves one’s soul. And finally, Jesus taught his students to be followers of the “one right way.” Confucius wanted his students to be good people but continue to live within the traditional society of the time. Socrates wanted his students to be good citizens and question the ways of society to create something better. Jesus wanted his students to follow his lead because he (and only him) had the right knowledge and wisdom to live a fulfilling life.
In analyzing the second model of studentship Roth writes:
Self-control is a recurrent theme as Socrates urges his conversation partners to learn from hard work, to take pleasure and knowledge from successful toil. Eupraxia (well-being) comes from having learned from the successful completion of a difficult task.
For Socrates, the application of learning ideally leads the student toward a path of problem-solving that ends with more learning. While the problem-solving may be difficult, it is in solving the world’s difficult problems from which well-being arises. It’s not enough just to work hard. You have to be working hard, solving real problems, and learning about yourself and the world in the process in order to truly be well, according to Socrates. I don’t think the commonly understood definition of well-being today means working hard, solving problems, and learning. Oxford languages defines well-being as:
“the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.”
For Socrates, well-being arose as a byproduct of hard work and critical thinking. For me, I’ve been chasing that comfortable, healthy, and happy life 🌴 (Slacker Millenials…sheesh 🙃)
Later on in his book, Roth looks at later philosophies of what it meant to be a student, circa the 1700s.
“…[T]he Protestant philosopher ([John] Locke) and the Catholic priest ([Charles] Rollin) agreed that a primary goal of education was to triumph over self-interest, learning instead to love the common good. Locke looked to education to help the mind control the body. Rollin looked to education to turn students from the selfish pursuit of luxury that “would destroy the most flourishing states and kingdoms.” For both thinkers, being a student meant learning how to give up the question for private pleasure and to contribute to society.”
For these two thinkers, the goal of formal education was to become part of a functioning society. Ideally, a functioning society solves meaningful problems, or in the case of Rollin and Locke, allows for the continuation of a “traditional” (read: religious”) world order. The problem these philosophers were trying to solve through education was how to get everyone in line with the religious order. In the world we live in today, we seemed to have regressed back to that “selfish pursuit of luxury” (wealth and access to power). The argument is still out on whether or not this will contribute to the destruction of “the most flourishing states and kingdoms.” However, our formal education system is still being utilized to produce citizens who will love the common good. It’s just that the common good has little to do with community and mostly to do with your wallet.
And then there’s this from Roth:
“Higher education in the United States had always been concerned with “character development” which, apart from traditional Christian moralism, also meant steering the student away from private concerns and toward the needs of the community.”
Again we see this emphasis on the common good. Today’s problem is no one can agree what is good for the common. Isn’t it interesting that the “needs of the community” so often gets turned into how do we sell more things to people? Rather than teaching kindness, compassion, and service (all arguably universal community “needs”) character development in the eyes of higher education seems to have become about your ability to make money (or not, and then you just choose a major in the liberal arts and hope for the best 🙋🏻♀️😂). Formal education is supposed to be about teaching one how to become a better citizen, but in our current time this just means learning how to become a successful cog in the capitalist wheel. It matters how well you do in school because how well you do in primary school will determine where you get to go to college and where you go to college can determine the opportunities afforded you afterward.
Roth writes:
[William] Deresiewicz believed that the neoliberal creed of market success was driving the herd. The smart kids wanted the good internships and the good internships were in consulting and finance. They were good because they led to jobs that paid very, very well. In the winner-take-all economy, you either went for the gold ring or you were a loser. Thinking for oneself, being on an enlightenment path to maturity, might get in the way of learning how to fit into the privileged slots that the economic regime offered to students it considered the brightest. We’ve seen that since the eighteenth century being a student was increasingly linked to thinking freely, but today the idea of freedom has been increasingly displaced by the lure of economic advantage.
He said it, not me. You are not free when you have to be a cog in someone else’s wheel. Being a good person, doing the right thing, being in relationship with others—what educators would call “social-emotional” learning—is secondary to academic success. Academic success—and in adulthood, financial success— is the benchmark for today’s education. That educational policy starts in Kindergarten.
A mother’s perspective
I’ve been thinking more about all this as I contemplate my son’s impending path of studentship. He is almost five years old and next year qualifies for Kindergarten. As I researched options, I became overwhelmed. (When I grew up there were no options, you just went to Kindergarten at the public school you were assigned, end of story). This sense of overwhelm prompted me to ask more philosophical questions (because I’m weird/wired like that):
What does it mean to be a student?
What does it mean to educate?
What is the purpose of education?
What do I want my children to receive from their education?
What is the current tradition of learning we are passing down to our children?
My thinking was also inspired by a recent post by
where she discussed the stress involved in making the right educational choice for her child after struggling for years in the traditional school system. After sitting in my overwhelm, I discerned that for our family we have two realistic Kindergarten options and a dream option (though there are more I’m sure).Option 1: Do nothing
We can keep my son at his current preschool for a 5-days/week half-day program that qualifies as Kindergarten. He’d then graduate from that school and move on to first grade at another school. His current school is very play-based, values the natural world, and doesn’t do worksheets. He’d learn the foundations of reading and math skills but he wouldn’t get the intense Kindergarten reading lessons like his peers at the local elementary or private schools. He’d likely enter first grade behind the other kids in his reading skills. However, experts agree that children don’t learn to read until around age 6 or 7 (first-second grade)1 and the idea that a child needs to know how to read entering first grade (which is a thing where I live in the Washington DC suburbs…) is actually not developmentally appropriate.
Scientific research is quite mixed on the benefits of full vs. half-day Kindergarten programs and while academic achievement does seem to increase in the short-term for those who attend full-day programs, the gap in achievement evens out by third grade2. It seems that the quality of the program matters more than the length and if you don’t need full-day childcare (which is a HUGE issue), quality half-day Kindergarten programs aren’t going to be the reason why your child fails in life. I can’t help thinking about whether it’s useful to start drilling Kindergartners with high academic expectations. Is that what we want to teach our children about the world? That it is an intense, unfair, uncomforable, stressful place and you’ll just have to learn how to deal with it? While I won’t argue that it’s not the truth, it still seems cruel. Maybe the world is the way it is because we’ve been taught to look at it that way. Maybe if we taught our kids that it’s okay to play and be imaginative and be outside, future adults would be much happier and we wouldn’t have the mental health crisis that we’re seeing in teens and pre-teens today, especially among girls.
Option 2: Do what most people do
Send our son to the elementary school that is right around the corner from our house. This is a 5 days/week full-day program that includes the option to enroll him in a well-regarded Spanish immersion program. The issue I have with this option is that I can’t imagine my son sitting at a desk all day long with only 30-minutes dedicated to outside play. I know he’d adapt, but do I want him to? What is he losing if I force him to sit at a desk all day long and do worksheets? At 5 years old!
Beyond the all-day sitting and not enough outside time issues, my honest-to-god hold-up with sending my son to the public school is safety. I fear, more than anything else in the world, sending my child to public school because of the ever-present threat of gun violence. It doesn’t matter where we live or how wealthy or highly-rated the school district, I cannot rid myself of the anxiety and fear of a school shooting. Did you know that in 2020, firearms became more deadly for children than car crashes???!!! School shootings are a uniquely American problem. America is doing something very, very wrong if a mother has to worry about sending her child to school.
Which brings me to the question, what role does the parent have in educating his/her child and how active are most parents in their child’s education/life? I’m not talking about homeschooling because that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms that I will not touch. I know my limits and as much as I love teaching one of my personal boundaries is summed up nicely by my trusty reply anytime someone asks me to teach a kid’s yoga class: “I don’t teach kids.” My hunch is most parents do the best they can to offer some homework help but probably aren’t taking on much additional teaching to help their children integrate what they’re learning in school. Between work, other kids, household responsibilities, and maintaining their own sanity, it’s not that parents don’t want to be involved, rather there’s just no more time left in the day! And on the homework front, most parents can only help to the extent they understand the current teaching mechanisms for universal concepts like grammar and long division.
Some comic relief on that point via fitdadceo on Insta:
Parent involvement matters to me because, my irrational mind justifies that more involved parents make it less likely that a child will take a gun to school and shoot a bunch of people. But that probably doesn’t make a difference at the end of the day either. Access to guns are the problem and we can’t escape them. Which leads me to…
Option 3: Do the unthinkable (no, not homeschooling)
Send him to a private school that offers a 5 days/week full-day program but values the outdoors and provides more active learning opportunities than the public elementary school. Research shows that only 6% of school shootings have happened at private schools. The private school we looked at for my son is steeped in the philosophy of the progressive education movement, which I’d never heard of before but seems to better align with my own thoughts on what education should be. The problem with this option is the outrageous price tag. I can’t bring myself to pay more than my annual college tuition to send my son to Kindergarten (and then do that for 17 more years…for two children).
Progressive education is an educational philosophy widely contributed to American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey. This form of education favors child-centered and project-based learning similar to Montessori philosophies, believes in active learning models that keep the student engaged in their own learning, and highly values the theme of democracy. According to the Progressive Education Network, schools that employ the progressive education philosophy prepare students to be “engaged citizens in the broader world.” Whether or not this leads to education for the sake of personal gain or for the sake of collective societal improvement is dependent upon each school’s individual implementation of the broader philosophy. Progressive education schools typically place a high value on nature and social-emotional learning on top of academic success. It values educating the whole child instead of just the child’s brain.
Back to Roth. He writes:
Rabindranath Tagore emphasized that active learning isn't just about empowering the student to do more or acquire more; it’s also about expanding the student’s capacity for feeling, especially for empathy. “We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.”
Tagore’s educational philosophy points to a yogic-inspired approach that centers social-emotional wellbeing and considers the whole child, not just the intellect or the body as separate entities. It highlights the importance of teaching emotional intelligence and being more compassionate, empathetic, and understanding—qualities that are innately feminine in nature and mostly non-existent in current traditional curriculums in the Unites States public school education system. I see this Eastern flair in the progressive education philosophy.
However, the progressive education philosophy has been widely criticized over the years and there is a lack of scientific research supporting its methods (surprise-soft/feminine skills are hard to measure in systems created by men!). According to a U.S. News & World Report article:
“[E]xperts say that more research is needed to effectively measure student learning and longer-term outcomes. Cucchiara says that the skills progressive schools seek to develop in students, including personal agency, communication, critical thinking and passion for learning, can be more difficult to measure than, say, whether they know how to diagram a sentence.”
Scientific research is great, but sometimes personal intuition is a great guide too. My personal intuition says that personal agency, communication, critical thinking, and a passion for learning are the skills our future generations need to lead (and save) our world. Not memorization, how to take a standardized test, and how to hide behind a desk when an active shooter enters the building (though that’s, sadly, a useful skill to have too). Empathy, emotional intelligence, kindness, patience—all qualities associated with the feminine energies—are what this world needs more of.
We’ve ultimately decided to keep our son at his current school for one more year and I’ve effectively punted the public vs. private school debate to next year.
What’s more important: well-being or money?
Immanuel Kant thought that being a student never ends. I tend to agree. As Roth summarizes,
“Kant said that we lived not in an enlightened age but in an age of enlightenment.”
In other words, as a student you are always becoming. Enlightenment itself is unattainable. The best you can do is learn what you can and do something with that learning (maybe you can even solve some hard problems, learn some more, and achieve some eupraxia a la Socrates). Ralph Waldo Emerson felt that the purpose of formal education should be to help guide the student toward his/her purpose in life. Some more from Roth:
“The great object of education,” wrote Emerson, “should be commensurate with the object of life.” Emerson wrote that true education teaches one not to integrate into society or follow the crowd or its charismatic leader but to discover one’s own way.
By discovering your own way through the world, you enter the Age of Enlightenment. Not very many schools are teaching students to discover their own way. They’re teaching children how to fit into the way things are. But the way things are ain’t great.
In yogic spiritual texts, there is a difference drawn between knowledge and wisdom. I personally hold wisdom to be of the highest value. Society values knowledge. You get the A in school by paying attention and doing what the teacher says. You build a career by following the right people and doing what they say as well as you can until they put you in charge. There is very little room for intuitive knowing and “wisdom.” And forget about well-being.
As I sit here and write this at 9:21pm on a Friday night because my childcare called in sick at 8:45am this morning and I had to cancel all my work for the day and hang out with my kids (#motherhood), my husband sits hunched over his computer in the next room toiling away over mundane contracts so that some company can buy another company and a few rich people can make more money. He has worked 20-hour days (no joke) for the past week, and 12+ hour days for the last month (including weekends). Just last night he relayed to me the most exciting part of his day, which was when he realized that the UK employees came online to work while he was still working here in the US, fulfilling the absolute crazy promise to the “client” that their team of lawyers would be working on their deal “around the clock (on two continents).” I can assure you with complete authority that my husband is experiencing zero well-being right now. He is solving (someone else’s) problems, and he may be learning a thing or two (like how much he hates his job), but there is no eupraxia to be found here. And while he was warned by every. single. person. he consulted before going to law school not to do it because it sucks, the allure of the prestige and the money and all the trappings of that winner-take-all economy were too strong. So here we are. It is now 9:28pm. We are still not well.
My dad’s advice to me and my sister all through our high school/college/early career years was this: “Play the game.” As a parent who wanted his children to succeed more than anything (and that means in the economic sense because that’s what success means in society), he recognized what needed to be done and begged us to do it. I played for a while, until I realized that I could never win and be happy. I have been told by countless people that I should have been a lawyer myself. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I knew I would never be well. And therein lies the problem. The game is stressful and takes you away from your true, authentic Self. It forces you to think and be a certain way in order to succeed even if every cell in your body resists. The game does not allow you to be well. In fact, it is designed to make you sick.
I don’t want to teach my children that to succeed in this world you have to get straight A’s and get into the most elite college and get the best internships with the most well-funded companies. I don’t want to teach them that to succeed in this world you have to make as much money as possible, that you have to be a doctor or a lawyer or work on Wall Street. I understand the reality. You have to make money. Like any parent, I don’t want my kids growing up hungry and broke. But I also want my kids to think for themselves. To be curious. To be kind. And most importantly to be “well.” I want them to work hard, to solve problems, to be creative, to learn. And I also want them to be happy, healthy, and comfortable. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. What can I say, I was raised in the age of “you can be anything you want to be…”, “dream big…,” and everyone’s favorite “follow your passion.” Okay, that last one didn’t pop up for me until about 2010.
When I talk about wellness I’m not talking about the Wellness Industrial Complex. I’m not talking about massages and supplements or even yoga poses. Living well, to me, is about finding contentment, fulfillment, compassion, connection, and joy. I’m not confident that when we drop of our children at school everyday, that’s what they’re learning. I know it’s hard because I struggle to cultivate these qualities in my own adult life. But then, maybe that’s the key to good, old eupraxia. It’s supposed to be hard. We’re supposed to always be learning.
To be a student of life means to learn from your experiences. It means to learn from the past and to try and solve today’s problems to create a better future. Wellness encompasses physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual aspects of your whole self. Our society has fractured wholeness into a thousand tiny pieces that don’t all fit together nicely anymore. You can be physically healthy but mentally frayed to pieces. You can be mentally healthy but physically ill. There are infinite combinations of how these pieces fit back together, but somehow there’s always one piece missing. We need to get back to a place where we can feel whole again. And we need to be teaching our children how important it is that they see themselves as whole beings in a complex, nuanced, difficult world. Wholeness will guide us home, wherever that may be. The question is, how do we get there? How do we empower future generations to prioritize their wellness and succeed?
I don’t know the answer, but I propose we start looking for it in Kindergarten.
https://www.naeyc.org/sites/default/files/globally-shared/downloads/PDFs/resources/position-statements/PSREAD98.PDF#:~:text=Given%20the%20range%20within%20which,early%20reading)%20by%20age%20seven.
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