WOTMR: Meditating on Workfare

The good thing about The Way of the Master is, that I sometimes don't need to listen to the whole program to get two great topics for this blog. Todays topics will be Yoga in elementary school and workfare programs.

First I'll start with the Yoga issue. Todd is more and more concerned about the adaptation of Yoga into the evangelical culture in America. As part of eastern mythologies he sees it as demonic.  Of course, - coming from that standpoint - he sees the teaching of Yoga and meditation as state-religion issue. If it were a state-religion issue we atheists would probably be the first to alarm the ACLU and get it out of school.
But it isn't.
Meditation and Yoga are forms of self-hypnosis which are as tools to achieve altered states of the mind used in eastern religions. That doesn't make them religious themselves. That Christians when they meet sit quietly, enjoy church hymns and listen to someone speak, doesn't make it religious to visit a theater or an opera.
But both behaviors bring your mind in a different state. In the first case it's the self-hypnotic nature which does it in the second set the mind is brought into a different that by the illusion of some higher authority present.
The Christian set is already used as a tool in public schools - when students have to sit quietly in class and listen. That the teacher already presents an actual authority doesn't help the students as much to learn as if they, by the set they are in, also unconsciously presume that the teacher is an authority. By our evolutionary predisposition we learn better from persons we presume to be an authority than from others.
Yoga and Meditation on the other hands are great tools to deal with stress. Hypnosis and self-hypnosis can be used for all kinds of things. Just like a hammer can be used for all kinds of purposes. If someone wants to use it to get "in touch" with some God than he will get "in touch" with some God.  The imaginary power of our mind is that big that he will even be able to see his God (whatever God he believes in). When we encounter people who practice eastern religions we should remind ourselves that our mind is able to create all kinds of hallucinations - even without demonic influence. Just look at the example of LSD. Do you really believe that a horde of demons comes every time someone takes it to fool him around, or isn't it more likely that the brain does those hallucinations on its own (with help of some toxic chemicals).
Apart from creating hallucinations self-hypnosis can be a tool to cope with stress. One should always try self-hypnotic practices before he considers stress-medication. If it is taught as such a tool, to elementary students, its a good thing.
Elementary School is not just about reading, writing and arithmetic - I fully have to agree with the teacher on that point. It has to prepare the students for life. Whether they already have stress is at this point irrelevant - it is undeniably beneficial for them to know how to cope with stress in the future lifes.

I'm happy that I've learned how to meditate during my karate classes - otherwise my blood pressure would sometimes skyrocket during the program.

Now to the workfare issue.

Ehre wem Ehre gebührt! (eng: Give honor to whom honor belongs!)
I find it laudable that Todd rebuked the most common conservative objections to welfare issues.
Those objections are very often very misanthropic (Those on welfare just scam the system) or unworldly (Those on welfare are just to lazy to take one of the many jobs available).

He suggested that the poor would better be helped with workfare programs. Which is a thoughtful answer. I, as a social-democrat --> Social Democratic Party of Germany, still have problems to fully embrace those programs. And I'll try to give an answer as thoughtful as Todd gave.
Workfare programs have the advantage that they give the recipients of those money the feeling that they've worked for it - at least if they do something meaningful. And that is where the problem starts. This meaningful work was maybe done by someone else. It is very hard to prevent workfare people from doing jobs that were done by fully paid people before the program started.
To give an example: In Germany there were one-euro-jobs introduced. Additional to their welfare money the people on those one-euro-jobs were paid one tax free euro an hour. If they denied to work in such a job their welfare money was also annulled or reduced for at least a month. By law those employers of those 1-euro-jobbers weren't allowed to replace workers that formally worked for them with those cheaper people on the workfare program. But the abuses of those 1-Euro-jobs aren't. In the community where I lived 1-euro-jobbers were for example used to clean the green spaces next to the roads - something a company was paid for before the program was introduced.
Workfare programs tend to produce a tax-subsidized competition in the low income sector and very soon you find yourself with many more people on workfare than there were on welfare before. Therefor they tend to accelerate a process of impoverishment of the lower classes in our societies.

Furthermore: Workfare isn't very forward-looking.
Many people neglect the causes of unemployment in our western civilization. Most of it is caused by an ongoing automation of our industries and a very cheap workforce in former Third World countries. To be able to compete with the rising nations of China and India our industry is forced to replace more and more manual work by automation. Those workers and specialists who can build and handle those machineries have to be highly trained. Those who are unemployed are therefor mostly those who are less educated.
That's the point were I would start. Instead of workfare I'd prefer edu-fare, programs in which welfare moneys are dependent on the participation in educational programs (i.e. to improve technical skills, learn foreign languages, improve in written expression and so on). If western nations want to compete with the rising nations in Asia, we have to remember where our strengths are. They are most certainly not a poorly educated but cheap workforce. Therefor we should stop to subsidize manual work that needs no education, but should start to subsidize programs that would raise the education of our workforce even higher than it is today.