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September
1999
Creating
a Stress-Free School in the Inner City
an
interview with Dr. George Rutherford
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Dr. George Rutherford has the kind of presence in a school that in a
movie might be depicted by Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman: certainty,
fortitude, and irreproachable integrity. In the spring of 1993, after
completing a tour of the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment in
Fairfield, he told the faculty: "I look around this school and all I
see are smiling children. This is too good for just 600 kids in Iowa. I
want this for my kids, and I'll have it!"
His kids were far from Iowa. Dr. Rutherford presided over a Washington,
D.C. elementary and middle school that resembled a fortress in an
embattled neighborhood, in the midst of one of the most violent areas of
the city. He first introduced the Transcendental Meditation program at
Fletcher- Johnson Learning Center five years ago to help quell tensions
among his inner-city students.
"We had amazing results," Dr. Rutherford says. "I used
to have to be in the streets all the time to stop the fighting, but after
we started the TM program, I didn't have to go out there. You walk into
the school and you feel it's tension-free, a stress-free school right in
the heart of the inner city, where we had plenty of violence."
Enlightenment magazine recently
interviewed Dr. Rutherford regarding this remarkable transformation of the
Fletcher-Johnson Learning Center.
Enlightenment: How did you
get interested in the TM program?
Dr. Rutherford: I first heard about
it when Dr. John Hagelin came to the School
to talk with my students concerning Natural Law.
Enlightenment: What was it
that convinced you to start?
Dr. Rutherford: One of John's
colleagues was telling me about Transcendental Meditation, and I told her
I wanted to try it. It was just something I wanted to try. And after
trying it, I loved it.
Enlightenment: What effects
did you notice in your own life?
Dr. Rutherford: Oh, everything
seemed to calm down. I had more energy, and it seemed as though my eyes
opened up wider. In other words, I became a better administrator after I
started meditating, because I didn't feel so stressed. I had a better
vision, could deal with a whole lot more, and do more for the School.
Enlightenment: And part of
that meant bringing in the TM program?
Dr. Rutherford: Yes, because I felt
it was good. And after seeing how the students were performing out in
Fairfield, I knew my students needed to have the same opportunity—to be
happy children and to get a better quality of life. And I felt the
Transcendental Meditation program would be one of the vehicles to bring us
out of the darkness and into the light.
Enlightenment: What was
your first step?
Dr. Rutherford: It is important
that teachers, who have daily contact with students, buy into what you are
doing. I was just delighted when one of the teachers asked me, "What
are you doing?" When I shared with her that I was meditating, she
decided that she wanted to try it. That triggered me to go to Dr. Hagelin
and see what we could do in order to train the folks at Fletcher- Johnson
We trained 25 to 30 teachers, in addition to the 10 others that had
already learned, and it was just beautiful seeing teachers wanting to get
involved with this. Once we got the teachers involved, that summer we
planned how we would get the students involved. Also that summer I had a
chance to go and see Maharishi in Holland. It was a great experience.
Enlightenment: How did you
teach the students?
Dr. Rutherford: We came back and we
talked with some parents, they signed permission slips, and we got some
students involved, the 5th and 6th grades.
The next thing we did was to put in the "Quiet Time." We knew
that our students wouldn't get chances at home to meditate, so we
thought it was best if we gave them a chance at school. We knew something
needed to take place in the mornings, because we had a lot of fights. Our
kids were very restless in the morning because of the stress, because the
night before they probably heard gunshots and didn't get any sleep.
So we put twenty minutes of Quiet Time in the morning and those
students that wanted to meditate did. Other students had to be quiet. They
read books or did homework in a quiet way.
And in the afternoon we had a lot of problems stopping fights on the
street in front of the school. So from 3:10 to 3:30 we put Quiet Time in
again.
And we didn't have any fights. I used to go down to the street on a
regular basis to stop fights, and it was very dangerous doing that. We
were able to not have any fights once we put the Quiet Time in, so we knew
the benefit was great.
Our next goal was to raise our academic achievement, and we found out
that our test scores did go up. One of the reasons was the Quiet Time,
getting the students ready before the standardized test. In spite of all
the negative activities that were taking place in the community around
that school, our students did extremely well.
The meditation during Quiet Time helped to remove the stress that they
were bringing to school. This alone made for a more pleasant environment.
Enlightenment: You shared
this experience in a recent meeting in Denver. What was the response
there?
Dr. Rutherford: I got a very
positive response. I talked with a board of education. They were extremely
impressed and are thinking about trying the program in their school.
Enlightenment: What do you
feel has created the new interest in this program?
Dr. Rutherford: The violence in
Littleton and the killing we have had in our schools. It really shook up
the world. The amazing thing about it is that it has all happened out in
suburbia, where you have the wealthy students and a mostly white
population. I'm saying that what we are doing in the inner-city schools
can also benefit those in suburban areas, especially Transcendental
Meditation.
Students are students; young people are young people. Some come to you
with a different set of stresses than others, but they all need a way to
remove stress. With the Transcendental Meditation program, I think we can
help remove all the stresses, from all the students, and make for more
quality living for all our children.
Enlightenment: If you had
the chance to advise every teacher and administrator in North America,
what would you recommend?
Dr. Rutherford: I would recommend
to all educators—for their own benefit— to get trained in
Transcendental Meditation. All of them come under stress and then they can't
perform in the ways they'd like to. By practicing Transcendental
Meditation, we can maintain the quality of life that we are trying to
offer our students, and be the kind of role models we are encouraging our
young people to follow.
Enlightenment: How can
schools afford to use their financial resources for this?
Dr. Rutherford: You'll cut costs
across the board. You'll have fewer students in special education, for
example. With the Transcendental Meditation technique, you'll be able to
bring the attention deficit students under control.
You won't have teachers out sick, having to bring substitutes in and
paying two people—the regular teacher and the substitute. Youll have
built-in academic achievement, because once you get the stress away, the
kids will do well anyway. School systems should use common sense...thats
all, just common sense.
Enlightenment: And
fortunately, there is good research to back up this program.
Dr. Rutherford: Correct. We've
got plenty of research. The Transcendental Meditation program has been
researched more than any other program, and yet educators are talking
about all the "reform models" for education, where
consultants charge twenty, forty, or one hundred thousand dollars to come
into the schools.
All we have to do is take Transcendental Meditation into the schools as
the reform model. It'll change everything.
Enlightenment: What's
being reformed with the TM program is the quality of a person's nervous
system, and then that affects their thinking and activity.
Dr. Rutherford: Yes. What they are
doing with reforms today is rehashing old stuff. There's nothing new in
education. But if you take Transcendental Meditation in—it's not new,
its just common sense—youll see that once you remove the stresses,
academic achievement goes up, everything improves.
I just feel that it is the time to try the Transcendental Meditation
technique in our schools across the country. Even if just one city took it
on, they would see a tremendous change. |
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