Yoga? I don't think the Rednecks are going to like this....

[captainsblog]

It's become all the rage (and I do mean rage) to send videographers out to Republican rallies and catch the worst of the Obama-haters on film. And as easy as it would be to write it all off as red-state redneckery, it's just as important to remember that things aren't much better under our own blue-state skies.

Massena, New York, for instance:



An upstate New York high school has won community approval to offer students a voluntary yoga program, as long as it's not called yoga.

The program at Massena High School has been renamed "Raider Relaxation" -- after the school mascot -- and includes the same exercises that drew objections last month from some parents who said yoga promotes Hinduism and had no place in school.

"It is still yoga. If opponents feel a name change solves the dilemma, I'm all for that," Board of Education President Julie Reagan said Wednesday. "We are basically doing the same thing, we're just calling it something different."

The compromise was reached during a meeting between Superintendent Roger Clough and several parents. Clough said parents agreed to change the name of the in-class program and set up an after-school club to give interested students a deeper understanding of yoga.

Special education teacher Martha Duchscherer and Kerry Perretta, a Spanish teacher, began using yoga in their classrooms last year to relieve stress before exams and had approached the school board this fall about letting other teachers use the breathing and relaxation techniques in their classes.

Perretta and Duchscherer are both in the process of being certified by the Temple of Kriya Yoga in Chicago. After finishing their training, they will be qualified to teach yoga methods to other educators.

It was when the teachers asked to expand the program that a group of parents raised concerns. They claimed teaching yoga in school would promote Hinduism and violate the separation of church and state.

"Basically, what they're going to do (in class) is simple breathing," the Rev. Colin J. Lucid of Calvary Baptist Church, one of the program's original critics, told the Watertown Daily Times. "The breathing is just what they would do in gym."

Reagan, a professor of classroom management courses at the State University of New York at Potsdam, said the board supports the yoga program, whatever it is called. One hundred schools in 26 states use yoga in the classroom to relieve stress, Reagan said.

She said all the fuss has generated more interest among students.

The debate around Massena's yoga program is not unprecedented. In 2002, a group of Baptists in Aspen, Colo., objected to a proposed yoga program in the public school district, citing separation of church and state as well.



In other developments, Massena home economics classes have been warned against using muslin towels, shop students will not be able to make any kind of wicker furniture (reminders to be sent home right before Samhain), and kindergarten teachers have also been banned from leading the children in singing "The Llama Song" because of its ties to Buddhism.

Comments

[angledge.livejournal.com]

If these kids are so weakly rooted in their Christian faith that a few classes of yoga is enough to turn them into Hindus, I think the parents should be questioning how well they have educated their children in their beliefs. Just sayin'.

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

*shakes head*

[sgauta.livejournal.com]

As a yoga teacher in a sometimes-blue-but-mostly-red state, I'm used to this crap. I have a teacher friend who was teaching at a church and had to call it 'Ladies' Stretching Class' because there was an uproar about calling it 'yoga.' If I've said once that "yoga serves people of all faiths and is neither its own religion nor a promotion of Hinduism", I've said it a thousand times. Many of the underlying concepts (in a "classic" yoga class) closely mirror Buddhist concepts, but damn that compassion, tolerance, and lovingkindness stuff.