The New York Times takes a positive look at the benefits of prayer in public schools.

"On the first day of the new school year, the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, stood in an elementary school classroom in Queens beaming at a hushed room full of fourth-grade children sitting cross-legged on the floor. 'Please let your eyes close,' said a small boy named Davinder, from his spot on the linoleum. Davinder gently struck a shallow bronze bowl. Gong! 'Take three mindful breaths,' he said, and the room fell silent.... "

In schools in New York City and in pockets around the country, the use of inward-looking practices like mindfulness and meditation is starting to grow. Though evidence is thin on how well they might work in the classroom, proponents say they can help students focus and cope with stress....

“It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company,” said Bob Roth, executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, a charitable foundation founded by the director of “Blue Velvet,” that promotes and teaches transcendental meditation to adults and children, including those at Brooklyn Urban Garden. “Now we’re working with all the large banks, we’re working with hedge funds, we’re working with media companies. People are having us come in as part of their wellness programs, and that wasn’t the case even two years ago.”

It's the religion corporations love! Remove the pesky "God" character, and you're good to go.

“We’re putting it in a lot of our schools,” Ms. Fariña said about mindfulness, on the first day of school, “because kids are under a lot of stress.”...

Last year, [Public School 212 in Jackson Heights, Queens] converted a large closet in a subbasement into a room devoted to mindfulness, complete with dim illumination and a string of rainbow Christmas-tree lights, allowing users to switch off the harsh fluorescent light overhead.

Oh! We're still saying "Christmas"? I guess it's good for balance when the religion you're practicing in public school is not Christian.

IN THE COMMENTS: About that Bob Roth quote — "It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company" — Terry says: "When was that? Just another bit of liberal fantasy." And I say: "After the Beatles had their bout with the Maharishi, being into TM marked you as a bit of a flake." That's why we all got the joke in "Annie Hall" in 1977, when Jeff Goldblum (unknown at the time) made that phone call: