MEDITATION IN SCHOOL: TENSIONS BETWEEN COLONIALITY AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

Abstract

The expansion of meditation programs in school settings has been supported by a growing body of scientific evidence whose production remains concentrated in the Global North and disconnected from the sociocultural conditions of the contexts that receive them. This article analyzes how the implementation of mindfulness in schools expresses and reproduces the coloniality of knowledge, identifying three articulated mechanisms: the linguistic hegemony of the term mindfulness and its resistance to localized translation; secularization as the epistemic dispossession of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions of origin; and the geographic and disciplinary concentration of scientific production and its universalizing application. The study is grounded in the findings of a doctoral thesis that combined literature review, systematic review with 20 studies selected from 288 records, qualitative categorical analysis, and interpretive analysis, guided by decolonial frameworks and Foucauldian concepts of biopower and governmentality. The systematic review found that all journals in the corpus originate from the Global North, that race and ethnicity are absent from the analytical models of most studies, and that adverse effects were not recorded in any of the 20 articles. The critical analysis showed that mindfulness, when decontextualized from its philosophical matrices and co-opted by market logic, may function as a technology of governmentality, adjusting behaviors to institutional norms without interrogating the structural conditions that produce the suffering it claims to address. It is argued that a non-colonial incorporation of the practice in schools requires recognizing local epistemologies as central, ensuring the agency of cultural actors in decision-making processes, and adopting critical interculturality as a structuring pedagogical principle rather than a decorative resource.