CHAPTER 11: Yoga and Higher Education: Adding Concentration, Clarity, and Compassion to Learning

Education, when used properly, can be one of the most important keys to open the doors to a more peaceful, harmonious, and interdependent global community. This is especially true in the case of higher education, where future community, national, and international leaders are trained. In order to envision how this process can be actualized, we first have to understand what the means and ends of present day higher education are and how they could be modified to achieve that vision.

Although issues such as social justice, world peace, etc. are part of the rhetoric of many institutions of higher education, these concepts are largely overshadowed by the promotion of business, science and technology, and other vehicles of material progress and economic profit. Corporations are increasingly financing academic research departments and programs that serve to directly benefit corporate interests. This, in itself is not necessarily negative, but it often results in a tremendous imbalance in what gets taught and what gets overlooked.