Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa

8. Enlightenment for All Ages

enlightenment for all ages ° 109 Children the world over power up laptop computers every school day to link wirelessly to the Internet. Such connections, indispensable for such trendy devices as iPads, are as common as blackboards in many countries . But that’s not the way for a couple of hundred students at the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (MSAE) in Fairfield. “We know we’re often bathing in other people’s Wi-Fi, but we’ve decided not to contribute to it in our learning environment,” says Richard Beall, head of school at MSAE. The worry is that the unseen electromagnetic waves could interfere with clear thinking and sleep as well as pose health risks, including cancer. For MSAE, the issue goes deep. Maharishi, the school’s founder, was wary of electromagnetic radiation. He urged people to avoid cellphones and wireless Internet connections, telling followers in 2007, “I don’t want to have it in the room.” Taking his counsel to heart, followers since then have cited health worries, pointing to studies on cellphones around the world. They’ve shielded electric wires, urged people to unplug devices and shut them off when not in use, and they avoid Wi-Fi. MSAE’s students and staff do use computers, but they link them to the Internet by cable. Officials at MUM are similarly wary. Wireless computer networks are barred in some gathering places on campus, such as the meditation domes and in some dorms, although MUM has reluctantly loosened its once more severe stricture on Wi-Fi. At MSAE, officials only grudgingly tolerate cellphones, and MSAE and the university campus are—in Beall’s 8 Enlightenment for All Ages 110 ° chapter 8 words—“swimming against the stream” among educational institutions in the United States in curbing Wi-Fi in computer uses. That’s not the only way that MSAE hews to its own course. The students at MSAE meditate daily. From age ten through their senior year in high school, they practice the essential TM technique a couple of times a day. Sporting white polo shirts, khaki pants, or uniform green plain jumpers, they meet on the fourth floor of the well-lighted, modern, and airy school building —built in accord with the late Maharishi’s architectural principles—for yoga, breathing, and meditation. Middle- and upper-school students begin their day with a group program promptly at 8:33 a.m. (or five minutes earlier for older students). Then they break for breakfast, followed by class at 9:25 a.m. After classes end at 3 p.m., they meet for another group meditation. Lest younger kids feel left out, they begin their days with a Maharishi Word of Wisdom session, an eyes-open meditation technique that backers say kids as young as four years old can do while walking. School officials call it “consciousness-based education,” which Beall says boils down to a matter of “how awake we are, how alert we are.” To sharpen their young minds, the students meditate for periods roughly equal to their age—ten minutes for ten-year-olds, fifteen minutes for fifteen-year-olds. “The student that walks into the classroom is not the same one that got out of the car,” adds Beall. “They’ve downloaded some of the fatigue and stress or whatever and they go into the classroom wide awake. And our teachers better be ready for them.” Meditation and the insights of Maharishi are a big part of what students at MSAE learn, but not everything. They get lots of reading, writing, and arithmetic as well. Indeed, they get such good educations that some graduates have gone on to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the like, and the school routinely produces National Merit Scholars and wins academic and athletic competitions. “We call it 200 percent of life,” says Beall, a tall, square-jawed, former semipro baseball player who grew up on an Ohio farm and earned an undergraduate degree at Wittenberg University in 1974. He later earned his master’s degree and doctorate at Maharishi University. “We’re a college-prep school and so we’re trying to prepare our kids for the best college experience that they can have. And we have that obligation to them, so we’re giving enlightenment for all ages ° 111 them a conventional education. But the other 100 percent of that is the idea of inner development.” MSAE’s aim, to...