INTRODUCING
The Premises of Our Premises:
What is In Your Right Mind ALL About?
How We Learn (optimally take in information)as individuals is an extraordinarily powerful process. It shapes our reality, serving as a lens through which to focus (or unable to focus effectively & efficiently) upon events, functioning also as a filter sifting against a set societal standard.
How We Are Taught can either match how we are hardwired to learn, creating the optimal synergy which transforms information presented into education acquired, or it can fail to connect and register, substituting and mislabeling time spent and information distributed as education offered and refused.
Unfortunately, the ever-growing gap between those who require a more effective, meaningful approach to their learning needs and those actually having access to having those learning needs met, has escalated into a real Crisis of Confidence in Education. The unseen societal effects of this educational disaster are becoming more evident every day.
Simply put, we Do Not All Learn the Same Way, yet schools continue to teach as if we did! This disparity between learning needs and teaching style has inadvertently exploited a characteristic of the human species having to do with brain and hand dominance. That is, most humans are right-handed (and therefore predominantly left-brained), at a rate of approximately 8 or 9 “righties” to 1 “lefty.” Most educational methods, curricula and teaching style, are aimed at those who possess or are able to demonstrate (accommodate) a left-brained learning style.
Over the last 100 years, with the increased availability of books, literacy, and “book-taught teachers,” educators have moved slowly but surely away from a somewhat experientially (right brain) based learning process to one primarily requiring passive, cognitive, language (left-brain) mediated learning experiences, at least through most of Middle School and especially High School.
The insidious creep of promoting one singular approach to education has proven to be an insidious, unseen yet dominant societal force. By pre-approving and giving a head start to those who learn a certain (left-brain) way, which closely matches how schools deliver their learning, the system has ensured that these learners continue their academic dominance through the imposition of academic hurdles which marginalize those who learn differently. This bias severely limits subsequent access and admittance to post-secondary, graduate, and professional learning opportunities, an inherent flaw and bias that unfairly perpetrates and builds into our educational system an uneven playing field.
This imbalance has continued to spiral, disenfranchising, marginalizing and denying the educational civil rights of millions of people.
These subjective biases most students must now take for granted each class day shapes students’ and schools’ very definition of what constitutes intelligence itself, how learning must be acquired in order to be considered a serious, learned student. What accommodations should be granted to those who learn differently, which schools like to refer to as learning disabled, are in fact just opportunities to fairly meet the needs of diverse learners. However, labeling students who learn differently as “learning disabled” may not be too far off the mark, since the manner in which we accommodate the major demographic of learners certainly has empowered this constituency to be viewed as “learning enabled!”
Marshall McCluhan’s prophecy that the “Medium is the Message” has taken on a complexly dimensioned life of its own, as school systems demonstrate each day, It’s not what you learn, it’s how you learn!
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So! Here are our premises; please share with us what you think and what you are willing to do about them! If you recognize these premises as truths, please get behind our efforts: better yet, get Out In Front of our efforts! Begin to demand the kinds of changes in your local school systems which recognize that the realities of research into individual learning needs must be put into practice for reasons of individual civil rights, equal access and opportunity: all of the basic human rights which have engendered the promise of a better day for all of the great civil rights movements of the last thousand years!
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I. Schools are failing to properly educate a significant percentage of our students and
short changing society.
II. Individual Learning Styles,” How We Learn” or how a person best acquires learning (receptive) and demonstrates learning mastery (expressive) most effectively, has become a largely one dimensional, left-brain, passively defined medium within most of our educational, post-graduate, professional and business-oriented institutions. This approach reflects the majority demographic composition of
III. In abdicating responsibility to teach in a manner which does not penalize those whose learning style differs from the majority, our educational system consciously chooses to disenfranchise and marginalize the majority of left-handed individuals (approximately 7-11% of the population), in addition to right handed right brain learners, and all of those groups whose learning needs fall under the label of “alternative learners,” a figure overall which approaches 20% of the population, yet is ignored as if it didn’t exist at all!
IV. Left-Brain learners are primarily individuals who prefer to learn in a linear, passive, sequential fashion. They see the world through an analytic, quantitative lens and have a detail oriented perspective when problem-solving. They tend to have learning strengths which (somehow) have come to match the methods primarily used in classrooms across
- they are Auditory learners in a world full of lectures
- They are language based learners in a world full of essays and required compositions.
V. Right-Brain learners are “Strangers in a
- They are primarily individuals who prefer to learn in a multi-modal, experiential fashion
- They see the world through an intuitive, creative lens, and bring a “big picture” perspective to problem-solving
- They tend to have learning strengths which are incongruent with most Middle and High School curricula, other than the application of their creativity
- They are often encouraged to attend special schools purportedly intended to promote their unique talents
- They are visual learners who need to learn how to process auditory, lecture input more effectively in High School and College
- They are experiential learners who are forced to acquire information passively, sitting at desks.
VI. The evolution of the educational system in
VII. The existence of significant research into learning styles, multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, etc. has not been a catalyst for general acceptance of the need to meet all students learning needs. Indeed, even with all of the research, most educational systems appear content to “Blame the Victim.”
Why?
VIII. The educationally imposed filter through which we have come to view (and also to believe we know) what constitutes intelligence or ability has narrowed to the point where it has constricted the valuing of creativity, marginalized its relevance to solving the problems of our day, and in its place, has over-valued logic and analysis as exemplary. This has occurred at the expense of almost all other competing approaches which deserve consideration.
IX. As a lens, our educational system has become overtly inclined to value and focus on a left-brain analytic valuing of how information is organized and communicated, which doesn’t allow for either different approaches or different values.
X. As a filter, the narrow valuing and defining of intelligence has simply become a mirror for the demographic majority of right handed, left-brain learners. It provides them with a significant advantage which they are free to enjoy most of their lives.
XI. Learning Styles are no more a function of preference than our acceptance of sexual orientation is thought to be driven by preference or our more evolved understanding that choice of religion may be based upon preference, yet it deserves to be valued as promoting Freedom of Choice. The Civil Rights of students are violated each day that they are made to adhere to a set of left-brain norms educators term “standard curricula,” which is incongruent to their natural style of acquiring information.
Unfortunately, much of the curricula which compose Middle and High School classes fails to meaningfully take into account the impact different learning styles have upon how well a student performs within the context of how he/she is required to perform relative to their ability to perform (i.e. there is a distribution of intellectual ability apart from how information is presented)..
XII. Failure to value the inherent strengths and weaknesses identified as a function of learning styles results in the marginalizing and discriminatory treatment of significant numbers of students annually.
XIII. Complementarily, teaching styles, as a function of a teacher’s preferred learning style, has an enormous impact upon how a teacher chooses to communicate information as well as how that teacher requires learning to be demonstrated. In addition, the lack of awareness or valuing of different approaches to learning and ability leads to inflexible methods of teaching, which consistently fail to bridge the gap created by differences in the learning needs of students and teaching style of the teacher when those styles are incongruent.
XIV. The result on society of such a biased lens and filter has been the evolution of criteria and systems of admission to institutions of higher learning which have established admissions criteria, standards and procedures which are unfair and inequitable, and put in the place of equitable acknowledgement of learning differences a set of intellectual criteria which are simplistic and over-reaching in their relevance and application.
XV. Other results of this narrow valuing of learning styles other than a unilateral left-brain approach has been the de-valued role of creativity or intuition in the resolution of business crises, legal disputes, and in other general areas of daily commerce.
XVI. Rather than assume that individual differences (gender or race based, for example) and/or teaching biases (preferential calling on males, for example) serve as the root cause for a lack of learning opportunities and therefore create learning deficits in certain individuals, it would be more applicable and inclusive to view these groups as ones who have different learning needs which are not being met within traditional classrooms as a function of learning style, not gender, race, color, creed or even individual learning deficits. This would serve as a better, more unifying solution then promoting than segregation of students by gender and race, two approaches currently advocated to promote better learning, and perhaps even open up a dialogue to better understand how individual needs are not being met within traditional classrooms.
XVII. Public Schools, Graduate Schools, Professional Business Schools, businesses in general, regularly fail to include and assure appropriate levels of intellectual diversity and creativity, nor do they seem inclined to provide music and art education. Our Institutions of Higher Education and our Corporate Gurus have never truly learned to value the continual availability of creative problem-solvers within their respective systems. THEY like to think of this kind of information as one shot creative input rather than sustaining intellectual diversity!
XVIII. Current learning systems and business organizations are making decisions and functioning within environments depleted of staff capable of providing creative input. Instead, they choose to function within exceptionally simplistic, left brain inspired, quantitatively driven, and singularly uncreative frames of reference, which fails them whenever the answers required to solve the problem are not quantitative in nature!
XIX. How We Learn influences [literally] how we see things. How we see things influences our perspective, and our perspective is influenced by our creativity (or visa versa). In a world of complex systems, left-brain type thinkers regularly fail to grasp their inter-dependence with those who think creatively. Failing to understand the natural components which would successfully allow them to achieve their quest then leads them to their failure. This narrow world view endorses H.L. Mencken’s famous proposition that “For every complex problem there is a solution, which is both simple and wrong,” a world gone begging to acquire the rights to be heir to the Law of Unintended Consequence; our society’s failure to integrate the creative problem-solving potential with its analytic cousin, its intellectual diversity separated from individual identity. This simplistic approach will one day be pointed to as a key factor for the lack of sustained creative resilience of human beings in managing and providing answers for problems which confront us regarding our environmental ecology, economically, and humanely.
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