For the last year in partnership with Union Settlement we have been working on a GED program that integrates
martial arts and meditation as an integral part of the GED curriculum. This was made possible through the office of
Melissa Nieves who is director of Adult Education at Union Settlement.
Our research cumulated in a ten week class this spring which was unusually successful. The class was staffed by Meg Howard,
the principal GED teacher; Kris Acevedo, the martial arts teacher as well as Stan Koehler and Jonathan Figueroa,
the meditation teachers. During the past year both Stan and Jonathan have provided meditation training in a number
of other GED classes as well as with the Young Father’s Youth group. This was part of gathering information to develop
the curriculum used in the April 2009 pilot program.
Students or all ages and particularly high school students are continually told that they must pay attention,
must focus more effectively. However they are never actually taught how to do so with the same level of seriousness
that they are taught how to do math or science. At the same time, focus training as well as meditative practice is
neither experimental nor rocket science.
I’ve also been involved in supporting families that have family members that
join religious groups of which the family disapproves. During the late 90’s I
co-authored a book, The Cult Around the Corner, to help families concerning this
issue.
We introduced a series of exercises in meditation at the beginning of the course of study.
The student was expected to establish a daily meditation practice, just as they were expected to do
math and reading exercises each day. It might be noted that the meditation exercises were designed to be
secular; to be free of religious imagery and practices. This is consistent with the workshops provided to the
general public as well as the martial arts students at Peace on the Street.
The importance of physical movement in stimulating learning has become common knowledge.
We addressed this by integrating forty-five minutes of martial arts exercises during two of the four days of classes.
Our goal here was not to just have the student exercise but to stimulate the learning process by having the student be
educated in martial arts.
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The class ran for ten weeks, three hours per day, four days each week. Twelve adult students were enrolled.
We looked at two out comes. The first is the percentage of students that take the GED. The current rate for the
typical class at Union Settlement is about 20%. Eighty percent of enrolled students drop out along the way.
Of those who took the test about 1/3 typically pass.
Ninty five percent of the students in the pilot class took the test and four of them received their GED.
A formal presentation of the results of our approach was presented at the September Conference on American
Buddhism this September at Naropa University. Two new GED+ classes will be conducted this fall.
For additional information please contact us at
sk@zazenusa.com or 212-978-8776.
Select for a video on our spring GED+ program.
