What is it about?
Is school-based mindfulness meditation ideologically neutral? The paper argues that it is not. By medicalizing the curriculum, mindfulness meditation tightens neoliberalism's grip on young people.
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Why is it important?
The paper identifies curricular medicalization as the process connecting mindfulness in education to neoliberalism. Extant critical-theoretic studies have failed to make this link.
Perspectives
I wrote this article in the hope that people who jump on the popular bandwagon of presenting mindfulness meditation as a social panacea might think about getting off at the next stop. I think that the article will help mindfulness proponents to reflect on the wider social context into which mindfulness initiatives are currently being subsumed.
Professor James Reveley
University of Wollongong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Neoliberal meditations: How mindfulness training medicalizes education and responsibilizes young people, Policy Futures in Education, March 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1478210316637972.
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