There’s nothing wrong with a bit of yoga to relax you before a test, right? Wrong. Apparently, practicing yoga in public school encourages kids to explore other religions. Which is bad. Eh, what now?
According to an MSNBC article I was reading earlier, in 2002, a woman by the name of Tara Guber wanted to introduce yoga into public schools in order to help relax children before tough tests. No harm in that, right? Well, not everyone saw it that way, as both Christian fundamentalists and secular parents teamed up to accuse her of being a “new age nut” out to brainwash their children. Right. It’s understandable from a certain standpoint because some of the parents claimed it violated the separation of church and state since Yoga is an important part of the Hindu religion, but still, brainwashing? Yes, let’s convert school-age kids to Hinduism so they can…what, take over the playground? Come on.
Guber finally decided to eliminate almost every spiritual aspect from the yoga curriculum and it was accepted by over 100 schools nationwide, including the one at which it was so vehemently opposed five years ago.
But that’s not good enough for some people. Critics claim that even this version of yoga “goads young people into exploring other religions and mysticism.” I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Ignorance of other religions inevitably leads to conflict when the known and the unknown collide. Just look at things today. Few people know enough about Islam to realize that it’s not a “terrorist religion.” They just hear that Muslim terrorists are killing people, so they assume Islam praises this sort of thing. Of course, the media doesn’t help. But the simple fact of the matter remains: if people knew more about Islam, they’d realize it is no more violent than, say, Judaism or Christianity. So it seems to me that learning about other religions is a very good thing.
Of course, there are other critics who have more reasonable objections, saying that yoga is an important religious practice in Hindu. One practices yoga in order to reach enlightenment. It was never meant to be a fitness program. But hey, Westerners have been corrupting other religions for hundreds of years. And since yoga has been shown to improve grades and behavior, I have no objection to it in school. I think the benefits here outweigh the doubts.
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