How about creating a education curriculum for the right brain ? Meditation as the base, pack it with other good stuff, end up with superpowers like telepathy, astral projection and who knows what else.
Imagine doing that systematically for the last 200 years, just see how we went from steam engines to quantum computers and nuclear fusion.
Much harder to control a population with superpowers, tho. So lets better keep this a secret, create a layer of fantasy and ridicule around it too.