Is Our Public School System Neglecting Half of Our Kids’ Brains?

Most people have heard about left brain/right brain science. Ideally, while the two sides of our brain are responsible for different parts of learning and activity, they work in tandem to help us make our way through the world.  But in looking at what each side of the brain is involved in, I wonder if our increase in core curriculum and standardized testing is leaving out some vital educational opportunities that will end up being detrimental to our kids.

The left brain is generally thought to be in charge of all things logical, rational and analytical. Language mostly occurs here, as does mathematical reasoning and sequential thinking. These are the things we can (and do) measure on standardized tests.

The right brain is responsible for creativity, pattern recognition, design, story, meaning and context, among other things. It is here where the concrete information we take in every day finds a home, a place to be played with and understood more fully.  But these things, as they take longer to figure out and reach across different subjects, are incredibly difficult to measure in a quick, standardized way. In order to really see whether someone has a true understanding of something, we have to see how they integrate it, use it, see it fitting in to the big picture. This kind of knowledge is much more demonstrable – it has to be shown and not recorded.

Dr. Dan Siegel writes that the main job of the adolescent brain is to integrate the two sides of the brain, to begin to piece together what a child knows of the world and has discovered in ways that build a more complex understanding of consequences and possibilities. This process takes years and years – many of them in middle and high school – of practice.  But if our schools are increasingly teaching our kids to perform on standardized tests, memorize names and dates and places, and placing a premium on following pre-established rules and formulas, we aren’t giving these adolescent brains much to work with when it comes to the “right side” of things.  In a world where our children have fewer personal interactions with their friends (spending much of their time texting each other or ‘liking’ each others’ Instagram posts), they are already at a deficit when it comes to learning about social cues like body language, tone of voice and facial expressions.  If we continue to de-emphasize creative problem solving and critical thinking, we are putting them at a further disadvantage.

As art and music classes are cut to make more time for science and math classes, as recess and physical education go the way of the dodo, we are increasingly putting all of our eggs into the left brain basket and I wonder where it will leave us. So many of the most innovative thinkers in our world who have solved incredibly difficult puzzles are not people who were thinking inside the box. They were using their right and left brain in tandem to come up with new ways to tackle persistent problems.  When kids have time and space to sit back and think about the implications of what they are learning, when they are asked open-ended questions that prompt further introspection and contemplation, they have an opportunity to use both sides of the brain and the information tends to be more important and longer-lasting.

Social-emotional learning can reinforce the activities of the right brain and help adolescents with the integration their brains are trying to achieve during this time. Because the premise of so much of the curriculum of The SELF Project is based in curiosity, it expands connections between seemingly disparate things in our brains. When we ask “why?” or “how?” questions, we are building bridges and creating a depth of knowledge that isn’t possible when we only use one side of our brain.