figure a

This chapter discusses one of the main issues in present-day adolescent education in Denmark. The number of students reporting high levels of stress and mental health problems are higher than ever before, and the development of and initiatives to prevent mental or emotional strain dominate the debate on education. Accordingly, student wellbeing is now being monitored and measured as it never has been before. National data suggest that 39% of Danish high school students feel stressed every week and that 20% of the students report stressed every day. Some of the most frequently reported stress symptoms among high school students are concentration difficulties, racing thoughts, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, feelings of loneliness and sadness, headaches, fatigue, and a lack of school motivation (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017).

The increasing stress symptoms among high school students have caused growing concern among parents, student organizations, teachers, policy makers, and researchers alike, and different efforts are launched to address them. One of these initiatives is a meditation-based course entitled ‘Open and Calm’ (OC). The program is introduced at different high schools and with seemingly very good effects on stress levels among high school students. The OC program is a multimodal course based on the so-called Relaxation Response (RR) tradition, using meditative techniques to improve physiological stress symptoms, like lowering the heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate (Jensen et al., 2015). The relaxation response is elicited by (1) a focus on relaxed and receptive attentiveness (the “Open” part) and (2) a non-reactive witnessing of the ongoing experience (the “Calm” part) (Jensen et al., 2015).

The program was originally developed to reduce stress and improve mental health in the public health sector in general, but recent trials have shown that the OC program proves particularly effective and shows very promising results among high school students.

This chapter analyzes the rising stress symptoms among high school students and the related wellbeing discourse. It evaluates the OC program and discusses whether such initiatives are needed steps in battling stress among young students or if these initiatives represent a ‘therapeutization’ and individualization of wider structural and educational problems. The chapter also reflects on the general wellbeing discourse as it highlights implicit normative dimensions that might be problematic when it comes to schooling and education.

High School Education in Denmark

In Denmark, there are two paths of youth education; high school and vocational education. Since our research focuses on stress among high school students, this chapter will mainly outline the high school system.Footnote 1

Furthermore, there are four types of high school education for students; a short two-year program, a traditional general high school program, a business-focused program, and a technical program (the latter three of which last three years). To enter one of the four types of high schools, a new law states that the grade point average of the final exams from secondary school must be at least five (except for the short two-year program where the minimum is four). In Denmark, the grading system applies a 7-point grading scale (−3, 00, 02, 04, 07, 10, and 12), where a −3 is given for unacceptable performance in all respects and a 12 is given for the excellent performance. The minimum grade for passing an exam is 02. The four programs differ in their subject matter foci, with the business program emphasizing business-related subjects, like business economy and innovation, and the technical program focusing on technical subjects and project work. The traditional program has a focus on humanistic and classical subjects like history, geography, various languages, or religion. The short program is modelled after the traditional program but is mainly intended for students with less academic ambitions.

The different types of upper secondary education primarily prepare students for higher education, while also developing the students’ personal skills. Vocational education and training (VET), on the other hand, prepares the students for a particular trade and encompasses more than 100 programs, leading to more than 300 different qualifications (The Ministry of Higher Education and Science, 2016). VET lasts from two up to six years, depending on the training requirements of the different professional fields. To enter vocational education, students need to obtain a grade of 02 at minimum in mathematics and Danish at the final exam of secondary school.

In 2017, among 18-year-old adolescents, about 81% were enrolled in either of the two paths. The remainder either did not enroll in any educational program or took part in special educational programs aimed at students with special educational needs or students who for one reason or another are not capable of being enrolled in ordinary educational programs. Generally, approximately 97% of Danish adolescents are enrolled in secondary school education, including special educational programs. However, about 10% of them end up dropping out for personal or academic reasons, with more students dropping out of VET compared to high schools (Nurse, 2014).

Among 25-year-olds, about 74% had completed secondary education. Among these, about 30% had completed a VET program (60% men). After high school, most students enroll in higher education institutions, at colleges, business academies, or universities.

Generally, completion rates are high in Denmark compared to other European countries (Nurse, 2014). In addition, Denmark has a high secondary school completion rate goal of 95%, whereas the Europe 2020 Strategy has a completion rate goal of 90%.

Education in Denmark is free, and students above the age of 18 receive a stipend for their living expenses once they are enrolled in higher education (Nurse, 2014). This aims to ensure equal access to the education system regardless of one’s socioeconomic background. The admission to different study programs is regulated by different requirements for different programs, e.g., a minimum grade in relevant subjects or a certain grade point average. As a consequence, Danish high schools have experienced an increased focus on grades among high school students. As a part of this development, the concept of so-called ‘12-girls’ has become a well-known part of the Danish vocabulary in recent years. The term is used to describe a certain type of student (mainly girls) who gets straight 12’s (the highest grade on the Danish grading scale). The term often implies excessive perfectionism and very high expectations towards oneself (see also Szulevicz et al., 2019).

Some argue that the current and very strong focus on grades trigger increased feelings of stress among high school students (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017). This is discussed in the following section. The remainder of this chapter will focus on the traditional high school program since this is the context of the OC program implementation.

Stress Among High School Students

The latest national Danish health profile indicated that 15.5% of female Danes and 10.5% of male Danes classify as having poor mental health. Especially young women within the age range of 16–24 years seem to be subject to poor mental health (23.8%). Moreover, an alarming 40.5% of young women between 16 and 24 years reported to feel distressed. Rates of stress, anxiety, and depression are rising in the population in general but even more so among teenagers, and especially among teenage girls (Jensen et al., 2018). This is by no means only a Danish phenomenon. It is a general trend in most of what we refer to as the Western world, where rising levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues are becoming more and more common and growing concerns (Vostanis et al., 2013).

The high school years are in many ways critical years. It is the time when children turn into young adults; they prepare themselves to enter higher education or the workforce; they learn more about society, friendships, and their personalities. They basically discover who they are as they are preparing themselves to become independent citizens in the ‘real world,’ and they may challenge societal borders set forth by parents, teachers, and institutions. Although the high school years are tumultuous, they have traditionally also been associated with joy, immersion in schoolwork, and social activities (Nurse, 2014). While this positive picture of the high school years still exists, there is growing evidence documenting how an increasing number of high school students fail to thrive as they increasingly exhibit signs of poor mental health. A recent Danish survey (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017) revealed that, among more than 70,000 adolescent respondents, 12% felt distressed on a daily basis and 39% were distressed on a weekly basis. The high school students reported symptoms like sleeplessness, anxiety, loneliness, performance anxiety, increased introversion, motivational problems, low self-esteem, exhaustion due to high school demands, etc. Lupien et al. (2013) showed that increased levels of stress result in lower quality of life impeding academic success. Different international studies (e.g., Walburg, 2013; Leonard et al., 2015) suggest that high school students seem to be suffering increasingly from stress-related problems, even suggesting that we face a stress epidemic in high schools. Some researchers explain it may be due to problems of life increasingly being seen as pathologies (Brinkmann & Petersen, 2015), while others blame the pressure for students to complete education quickly and obtain good grades to be able to enter further education, leading them to fear failure and aggravate stress (Rabøl, 2018).

Action is needed when so many high school students seem to suffer from mental health issues. Over the last couple of years, a range of different responses and initiatives have been launched. Many high schools have established wellbeing teams for students and teachers alike; psychologists are hired to help distressed students; and much more attention is paid to the students’ learning environments in school and their social integration. In research, a so-called positive education paradigm (White & Buchanan, 2017) has emerged; positive education being an umbrella term for educational practices that try to promote empirically validated interventions and programs from positive psychology that have an impact on student wellbeing.

In the same vein, different contemplative pedagogies have recently gained a footing in high schools, which has been referred to as a ‘contemplative turn.’ In these contemplative pedagogies, students are encouraged to become more aware of their internal worlds and to connect their learning to their own value priorities. These contemplative pedagogies are generally considered mental health enhancing. They have stress reducing benefits by addressing specific cognitive dimensions, leading to a general sense of wellbeing (Oberski et al., 2015).

One such contemplative pedagogy is the standardized, multimodal meditation and evidence-based course entitled ‘Open and Calm’ (OC), which has recently been implemented as a trial in two Danish universities and different high schools. In the following sections, we will describe OC and subsequently analyze and discuss why a course like OC is considered a viable solution to the problems related to distressed students in high schools.

Open and Calm (OC)

OC was originally developed by the Danish psychologist and researcher Christian Gaden Jensen in the beginning of 2010 in order to handle the consequences of prolonged psychological stress in the public health sector. Many otherwise healthy individuals often experience the demands of the environment (often occupational) to become overwhelming in a way that disturbs their everyday lives and general functioning (Jensen et al., 2015). While not as high as in the U.S., where almost 25% of Americans regularly experience high levels of stress, in Denmark, the figures increased from 6% in 1987 to 9% in 2005 and 15% in 2012 (Jensen et al., 2015). The OC program has proven very successful and has improved self-reported stress, depressive symptoms, sleep disturbances, mental health, and quality of life among a great number of participants in Denmark (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017). Two of the largest municipalities (Copenhagen and Aalborg) in Denmark are now offering it to citizens who are on stress-related sick leave from their jobs (Moustgaard, 2015). The program’s success registers in the educational realm in Denmark and functions at both high school and university levels.

The Format

OC is a program for adults to reduce their stress and promote mental health and resiliency. The program takes its inspiration from the so-called Relaxation Response tradition from Harvard University, wherein meditation is a tool to reduce stress and promote better mental health conditions (Jensen et al., 2015).

The OC program is standardized and offered in two formats, a group format and an individual one. In the group format, the groups consists of eight individuals and involve a weekly two-and-a-half-hour group session with optional individual sessions, whereas the individual format works on shorter personal, weekly sessions. Both formats use the same material (a 120-page course book, including research findings on stress and a description of the steps in the program, references to online material, instructions for daily 10–20-min meditation exercises as well as short-term meditation exercises of 1–2 min, and audio files) (Jensen et al., 2015).

OC in High Schools

Nielsen and Lagermann (2017) launched a study at two different Danish high schools where the OC program, specifically tailored to young students, was implemented to help stressed students. The participants were divided into groups of twelve. The program lasted six weeks, and prior to the program, each selected participant took part in an interview in order to assess students referred to the program. The course program consisted of six meditation-based sessions with a specific theme for each one of them. The different themes for the six weeks were as follows:

  • Week 1: the basic method of OC

  • Week 2: the body

  • Week 3: the psyche

  • Week 4: social relations

  • Week 5: each participant chooses their own theme

  • Week 6: each participant chooses their own theme.

In addition to the weekly group-based sessions, each participant was offered two personal sessions with an OC instructor.

The participants were recruited among second-year high school students. All students had completed a questionnaire on wellbeing and were tested for stress and general mental wellbeing. A psychologist then informed all students about stress and wellbeing in general, and the students were encouraged to contact the psychologist for further information about the OC program. Based on testing and completed questionnaires, 24 students were selected to participate in the program.

The initial tests and questionnaire distributed to all students (439 in total) showed that the high school students felt significantly more stressed than the general population, scoring an average of more than 20 on the Cohens Perceived Stress Scale (which is a global and widely used psychological instrument for measuring the perception of stress), while the 20% of the general population who feel most stressed only score 17 (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017). It thus seems that the general level of stress among Danish high school students is very high.

The participants in the OC program were interviewed before, during, and after their participation in the program. Generally, the students reported to feel an omnipresent ‘performativity regime,’ marked by grade-grubbing, academic competition, the pressure for résumé building and career planning, and expectations from peers and parents. One of the students (Kiki) described these feelings in an interview, “You get the impression that you are fighting for the future of your life. If you don’t get the good grades, then it’s just too bad, and you will become a garbage man” (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017, p. 27, our translation).

Another student (Inez) talks about the importance of grades:

In my class, it is about answering in the right way ALL the time and about getting a 10 or a 12 (the best grades in the Danish system) EVERY time. I think that you both want to prove yourself to the teacher, and then it’s also about how your classmates view you. Basically, it’s about what kind of person you are. (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017, p. 29, our translation)

The students also described physical symptoms of being stressed. One of the students (Kirsten) explained this in an interview, “I feel tired. I don’t feel like eating at all. I also have mood swings. Yes, and you feel stressed because you are shaking, and it feels like you can’t breathe” (Nielsen & Lagarmann, 2017, p. 9, our translation).

Similarly, Kenneth explains how he feels:

And then I cannot cope with anything. I have a lot of thoughts at the same time. And then you cannot think about anything, and it just becomes too much. You cannot think at all, which is frustrating. And then I have mood swings, or how to say it. And then I either get angry or sad about everything. (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017, p. 10, our translation)

Many of the students described how they constantly felt the need to show their engagement in school and among peers, while, at the same time, they felt exhausted. They described a constant urge to exhibit the best version of themselves (best grades, good social relations, attractive after-school job, perfect body, fun leisure pursuits, etc.). With social media, this urge manifests itself. The interviewed high school students mentioned how social media was a daily stressor as it induced a negative social comparison and a decline in subjective wellbeing among the students.

Participants in the OC program exhibited stress symptoms like sleeplessness, concentration difficulties, mood swings, and sadness prior to their participation in the program. The students were further characterized by feelings of despair and resignation, with difficulties living up to their own expectations and expectations from high school, parents, and peers (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017). One of the students (Karina) described her feelings like this: “I signed up, because I am extremely stressed. […] I have never felt so bad in my entire life” (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017, p. 45, our translation).

In the follow-up interviews, all students described their experiences during the OC program as very positive and explained how the program had changed their everyday lives in important ways. As a recurring theme, the interviewed students described how the program provided a much-needed ‘space to breathe,’ how it helped participants to cope with stress in new and better ways, and to take things more lightly. The participants further formed a community, where they could share common experiences and help each other to gain a better understanding of themselves (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017). One of the students (Kiki) explained what it meant for her to be part of a group of students in the OC program:

I think that one of the things that helped was that we talked about why we feel the way we do and why we have these symptoms of being stressed. All this has helped me realize that there is a reason why I am fed up with it, and that’s fair. I have chosen to accept it and know that it’s not only me who is turning crazy and getting weird. I think that has helped me to take it easier. (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017, p. 53, our translation)

Many of the students also reported to use mini-meditations as an efficient stress-coping strategy in their everyday lives. Kirsten for example said:

The mini-meditations helped me the most because they bring me calmness. I feel relaxed and I feel refreshed before I start my homework. In that sense, I feel like I have gotten my appetite back, and my mood also changed a lot. (Nielsen & Lagermann, 2017, p. 49, our translation)

There were a couple of practical issues related to students’ participation in the program as some of the courses collided with classes or exams. Apart from that, they felt privileged about their participation in the program and recommended similar courses for other high school students.

Critical Reflection

When a growing number of young people seem to suffer from stress and ill-being, reflection and action are needed. Programs like OC that help reduce student stress symptoms are a natural and appealing solution for high schools. While we acknowledge the benefits of such programs, we would also like to discuss some inherent problems related to them.

Mindful education and neoliberalism. Education systems have evolved over the past 20 years. In today’s rapidly changing world, students face increasing performativity challenges and other types of pressure, like the need to build their résumés, to get the best grades possible, and to plan for their future careers. Moments of quiet and stillness are in short supply, and numerous studies (e.g., Meiklejohn et al., 2012) have shown the benefits of mindfulness-based educational initiatives like OC. Generally, mindfulness education is believed to help students foster greater concentration, self-awareness, patience, and resilience. Sustained mindfulness practice is further said to enhance emotional self-regulation and promote flexibility among students.

Bearing these benefits in mind, OC could be considered a corrective to the competitive and performance-based educational logic that high schools are increasingly driven by. To the contrary, OC and similar mindfulness educational programs could also be seen as supporting the performativity regimes in high schools, by subtly adapting students to new standards.

The performativity regime in high schools is a result of the fact that most education systems have been subject to an increasingly outcome-based and neoliberal school ideology, marked by the values of accountability, competition, standardization, and focus on individual student learning outcomes (Sahlberg, 2011). When an institution (a workplace, a high school, or a university) provides stress-reducing support, the goal is to help students. The backside of the coin is that such programs imply an individual responsibility of student stress (Nielsen & Lind, 2016). What happens if students remain stressed after having completed the program? Does this mean that they have not successfully incorporated the ideas of the program? And who—apart from the individual student—is to blame for this failure? What happens if stressed students do not wish to participate in the program? After all, meditation and mindfulness are not practices that appeal to every student, and if someone refuses to participate, it indirectly signals the individual choice of refusing help. Credo (1993) describes how health and illness have increasingly become matters of personal choice and will. This is the result of a new ‘healthism,’ implying that each individual is responsible for preserving their health and averting disease (Credo, 1993). Credo further argues how we, as modern individuals, are expected to do well and that we even have a duty to get well. In the same vein, most of the mindfulness-based programs (that we get to see in the Western world) are based on a strong belief in individualism, putting self-management at the core, also highlighted in neoliberalism (Reveley, 2016).

Theoretically, mindfulness-based programs like OC derive from positive psychology, and their goal is to enhance wellbeing by focusing on the positive and preventing problems from occurring. They become a matter of acquiring preventive coping strategies and increasing individual student resilience. The individual student is thus given tools, whereas high schools and stakeholders can be kept clear from changing the structural and pedagogical conditions that caused the stress in the first place. OC thus legitimizes how stress and student wellbeing become personal matters. In the following section, we will look at how the contemplative turn in education and the preoccupation with student wellbeing are in many ways ‘un-educational’ in nature.

The un-educational nature of the contemplative turn. From our perspective, OC is an exponent of the contemplative turn, which, according to Ergas (2018), is a countermovement to the emerging educational climate that highlights accountability, standardization, and performance. According to Ergas, the contemplative turn consists of three pedagogical elements.

  1. (1)

    Turning Inward. This basically means that contemplative pedagogies and programs like OC require a person to turn their attention to their own awareness. Ergas (2017) refers to this as a meta-pedagogical turn:

    The mind needs to be positioned at the center of our ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’ by balancing our meta-pedagogy. We need to become as interested in how the mind shapes itself deliberately and non-deliberately based on engaging the inner curriculum, just as much as we are interested in how ‘society’ shapes the mind based on the ‘social curriculum’. In practice this means embracing a meta-pedagogical turn, which implies the incorporation of practices that engage students directly with active attention. (Ergas, 2017, pp. 305–306)

  2. (2)

    Relationship with time. In most contemplative pedagogies, we see the embracement of slow rather than fast problem-solving and a general emphasis on here-and-now-ness. This is also evident in the OC program and its emphasis on non-reactive and contemplative witnessing of ongoing experiences.

  3. (3)

    Change in attitude. Ergas (2017) emphasizes how the contemplative turn involves attending to one’s own experiences. This also includes developing attitudes like non-judgment, discernment, kindness, curiosity, compassion, and acceptance to ensure the students’ acceptance of their own and other’s reactions and feelings under pressure.

Meta-pedagogical strategies are intended to help both teachers and students. However, without critical awareness of the broader educational, social, and cultural context, programs like OC easily play into an agenda of adaptation, compliance, and internal regulation as learning to become mindful becomes a way of providing students with the moral responsibility to augment their own emotional well-being (Forbes, 2017; Reveley, 2016).

Another reflection in relation to meta-pedagogy is that it tends to emphasize forms of teaching and learning and methods to promote learning rather than specific content (Szulevicz & Jensen, 2013). The potential result is a form-content dualism in which relations between the form (how the mind shapes itself/ how content is learned) and the pedagogical and didactical content of teaching and learning are left unanswered (Tanggaard & Brinkmann, 2008).

The form-content dualism is very common in the education system and is seen in many programs that try to promote self-regulated learning (SRL) and foster engagement, responsibility, and agency (Vassallo, 2012). It has also been associated with obedience and, from our perspective, a preoccupation with form, i.e., methods fostering self-awareness and self-consciousness (like meditation) instead of actual subject matter. With SRL and the contemplative pedagogies, the content of subjects and disciplines are de-emphasized for the benefit of developing meta-pedagogical or meta-cognitive skills among students. Kivinen and Ristelä (2003) raise some concerns related to fostering meta-cognitive skills in the educational sector, and they summarize their critique as follows:

Practices encouraging the observation of one’s own learning as an end in itself can basically be seen as a mere re-justification of testing that has traditionally ruled school activities. Instead of the pupils being taught new skills and knowledge, they are trained to monitor their own studies. A gradual improvement in the ability to work independently is quite rightly an aim for education, but it is by no means self-evident that this can be achieved or promoted by intensive concentration on the operative aspects of one’s own thinking. (p. 371)

Kivinen and Ristelä (2003) argue how student meta-cognition may lead to a psychologization of education in which students become self-reflective upon their own actions and where they are taught to contemplate their own learning, knowledge, and skills (see also Szulevicz & Jensen, 2013). From our perspective, this is an interesting and potentially problematic development. The abundance of initiatives that are launched to address wellbeing among students is basically non-educational in nature. Their focus is on working on the students’ inner psychologies (attention-span, self-regulation, social competencies, etc.), and the students thus become content matter themselves (Matthiesen, 2018).

The Dutch educational philosopher, Gert Biesta, views schools as a regime of control and accountability which creates a “rather un-educational way of thinking about education” (Biesta, 2014, p. 124). In the same vein, we would argue that contemplative programs like OC—but also a great deal of the current wellbeing discourse in the education system (McLeod & Wright, 2016)—promote un-educational ways of thinking. Matthiesen (2018), for example, argues how wellbeing-enhancing technologies bear the risk of producing passive and submissive subjects who are in need of therapeutic help. Oftentimes, they ignore how discomfort and struggles are always a part of learning and educational activities. Ecclestone (2015) puts it this way:

[W]ellbeing in educational policy and practice is now associated primarily with emotional wellbeing and mental health, while debates about wellbeing focus on which form of psychological intervention is most appropriate to promote it. (p. 36)

In our opinion, educational problems call for educational answers. Instead of trying to promote wellbeing through contemplative programs or other wellbeing technologies, we should take a closer look at the structural and educational conditions.

The fragilization of high school students. There are obvious economic interests in the therapeutization of learning and education. Many people earn their living from helping fragile students. Furedi (2004) has been a severe critic of what he labels the ‘therapy culture’ within education. Furedi argues that the education system is producing vulnerability among its students. In his recent book, ‘What’s Happened To The University,’ Furedi (2017) analyzes how universities, since the 1980s, have taken an increasingly paternalistic role, treating students as though they are not fully capable of exercising the responsibilities associated with adulthood. According to Furedi, this is the result of universities depicting their students as vulnerable individuals in need of institutions acting as parents. He further argues that this is a result of a more and more distrustful parenting culture, with overprotective parents who discourage their children to be autonomous and willing to take risks. When programs like OC consider high school students as stressed and not simply burdened or troubled, students are turned into subjects of pathology. A potential risk of this therapeutization is that the affective aspects of learning might undermine the greater purpose of education. Furedi (2017) further warns that treating students as fragile and vulnerable has a huge impact on student identity. This is how he describes how it has affected campus life at universities:

Campus life has been reorganized around the task of servicing, supporting and in effect infantilizing students, whose wellbeing allegedly requires institutional intervention. Many universities provide so-called wellbeing services, presuming that students need the intervention of professional service providers to manage the problems they encounter. Unfortunately, the tendency to treat students as children can incite some young people to interpret their predicament through the cultural script that infantilizes them. […] [M]ental fragility, and a disposition to emotional pain, often becomes integral to the ways in which some students make sense of their identity. It is how they have been socialised to perceive themselves. (Furedi, 2017, p. 8)

It is a controversial claim that high schools, when trying to help stressed high school students, might counterproductively be cultivating vulnerable students instead (see also Szulevicz, 2018). It is equally controversial that school-based mindfulness training like OC treats high school students as agents of their own wellbeing, in line with the neoliberal ideal of the emotionally balanced personality (Reveley, 2016).

Turnbull (2016) describes how young people become ‘commodities’ that are bartered, sold, and transferred based on their risk value. While students unequivocally experience difficulties during their high school years, it might also be possible that we are producing some of their vulnerability. Another yet related stance would be that we have developed an extremely competitive and performance-oriented education system that puts stress on its own students and teachers alike. In his book, ‘The Beautiful Risk of Education,’ Biesta (2014) distinguishes between strong and weak education. In Biesta’s terms, the current performance-oriented approach to education is a strong one, implying that education becomes more secure, predictable, risk-free, and characterized by standardization and accountability. Consequently, education and students become controllable subjects. However, Biesta argues that this approach basically misses what education is all about. Education is a slow, difficult, and weak process. Teaching and learning are both risky endeavors which can surface vulnerability. If education is overly-controlled, it is impossible to prepare the next generation to cope with new types of problems. Following this perspective, it is potentially harmful when OC promotes ‘being calm’ as an ideal among high school students.

Concluding Thoughts

In contemporary education, one of the main challenges is related to students’ wellbeing. While issues of access to education and social inequality were the main themes in the educational sociological literature in the 1990s, emotional wellbeing and student mental health have become imperatives in the current discourse. In many ways, this development reflects a therapeutization which has taken place while the education system has been under increasing pressure to deliver results and create effective and high-performing learning environments. An increasing number of Danish high school students suffer from stress and experience concentration difficulties, racing thoughts, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, feelings of loneliness and sadness, headaches, fatigue, and a lack of school motivation. In this chapter, we have discussed how contemplative practices are implemented in schools to help students deal with their stress symptoms. We wanted to open up the discussions about viable and sustainable responses to the apparent challenges many high school students face. We fully acknowledge that the rising stress symptoms call for reflection and action. However, we are also worried as many proponents of mindful education and contemplative practices in education seem to be unaware of how these trends unwittingly contribute to a neoliberal agenda in education (Forbes, 2017). Many of these techniques, developed to make students calm and relieve them from stress, are subtly disciplining the same students to adapt to the system. Our concern is that contemplative practices like OC shifts responsibility from fixing the actual problems to helping students live with them. Furthermore, meditation sessions are a rather un-educational way of dealing with (educational) problems, and we would like to call for educational responses (better study conditions, less testing, more feedback, more teaching hours, more supervision, etc.).