Thinking skills

An article written by Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland for the Boston Globe in 2007 promotes creativity in learning: “However, there is a very good reason to teach arts in schools, and it is not the one that supporters of the arts tend to do. In a recent study of various art classes in Boston area schools, we found that art programs teach a specific set of thinking skills that are seldom addressed elsewhere in the curriculum, and far from being irrelevant in an exam-based education system, arts education is becoming increasingly important as standardized tests like MCAS have a close influence on what schools teach. “

And why shouldn’t they? Dr. Betty Edwards, author of the best-seller “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” advocates the use of our right brain hemisphere and has written excellent courses that reveal the inherent underdevelopment of this side of the brain. Most educational programs, established in the United States in the 19th century, have a preference for left hemispheric instruction. Understandably, we were still essentially agricultural at the time, constantly emerging to play a major role in the Industrial Revolution. Whatever music, theater, and art instruction existed in the one-room school, it soon migrated to larger and larger classrooms where early New World manufacturing technology was a bright blaze on the future horizons of young Americans.

Race in space

In the 1900s, those nifty programs waned. The “Space Race” and Sputnik launched a total emphasis on learning science and mathematics and changed school curricula forever. Realizing that America, in the 1980s and 1990s, rapidly became a service- and technology-oriented nation, our manufacturing industries declined and a New Age of Technology changed the brightness of the future for school-age children. . Once again, in public and private schools across the country, the importance of that left hemisphere, so broadly delineated by Dr. Betty Edwards as the timer, the data finder, the logician, the number crusher, the financier, the worker in The charts and graphs would again dictate what our schools taught our youth.

Rich creative thinking

What we haven’t realized yet is that most scientific, mathematical, legal, and financial positions require creativity and that great progress has been made in these areas by “thinking outside the box.” In fact, creative thinking improves any part of our lives. How?

When we receive information, if we are basically trained in the American educational system, we process it as data, that is, it represents dates, times, graphs, factors, elements that regulate our life in a monetary, fiduciary, fact-oriented way. This is our perceptual reality. In fact, those best trained to process this data have a good chance of achieving good results in our culture. Could creativity make us better? Yes, because, with the emphasis on just one hemisphere of our brain, we really don’t have the whole picture. We are not cognitive for all the options our wonderful brains can offer. Therefore, we are severely limited: economically, culturally, politically, and spiritually.

The total brain

The development of our total brain, plus the brain stage of ancient Western culture, is still alive and well in many cultures today. But as the global economy spreads the word, educational patterns are shifting toward left-hemisphere education. Will we ultimately inherit a global and unbalanced outlook, severely limiting our brain capacities in favor of the left and delaying the use of the right? In the future, will he have limited offspring like that?

Science fiction?

This prospect is grim and hopefully just science fiction. If we choose, through cultural choices, to cut off the very rich resources on the right side, children and future children will inherit a two-dimensional world that stifles creativity, prevents invention and creative inquiry, blocks poetry, theater, and artists. . efforts and ultimately cuts out a very powerful resource. It could be that the world suffers from our restrictions on creative thinking.

This is my challenge. Learn your right side! You will become stronger, better equipped to deal with what the world has to offer you, and if you feel uncomfortable at first, well, go ahead, jump into the jacuzzi of creativity.