No Right Brain Left Behind

No Right Brain Left Behind: Must Kids Prep For 'Risk-Taking'?

Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY, 12 Jun 2009

On a recent foggy night, the newest wave in educational thinking crashed into this city's oldest high school.

And its waters weren't warm.

"It worries me that we're not thinking big enough, that we're not preparing our kids for a world that will be terribly different from the one we grew up in," says Patrick Bassett, scanning the rapt faces of a few dozen parents in the auditorium of 103-year-old Mission High School, whose alums include poet Maya Angelou and rocker Carlos Santana.

"We need kids to be more risk-taking, more entrepreneurial," he says. "More than ever, we need the right brain to mix with the left."

Although Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, has been quietly delivering this "Right-Brain Future" talk for a few years, recent economic events have lately sent him on the road non-stop. "My reception has shifted dramatically," he says. "More people seem to want to hear this message."

Here's the Cliff Notes version: As traditional jobs in the left-brain world of finance shrink, the USA's economy will increasingly be tethered to creative innovations rooted in right-brain thinking.

Sachin Desai, 45, attended Bassett's lecture with his wife, Sejal, 44. Both are software engineers; their sons are 12 and 8.

"Growing up in Britain, it was all about linear thinking," he says. "But my kids are American, a place known for coming up with unique solutions and ideas. I fear we're losing that. So it's critical these kids become creative thinkers."

No right brain left behind

An impediment has been a No Child Left Behind educational system that is too geared to test-taking, says Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the book that inspired Bassett to hit the lecture trail. "What's troubling is that our system is obsessed with standardization at the very time when the future of our economy depends on the opposite."

Some schools have gotten that message. At High Tech High, a charter school in San Diego, students are encouraged to use those skills to practical ends such as dreaming up new sources of energy or calculating ways to stretch the West's limited water supply, says the school's CEO, Larry Rosenstock.

"You want kids who are math whizzes, yes. But you want them to also have the creative talent to apply those math skills to find answers to big questions."

Barrett praises other schools that are pushing students to think outside the box. He cites Fay School in Southborough, Mass., whose students last year teamed with peers at South Saigon International School in Vietnam. Using video chats and a specially created online wiki-space, they designed a "socially conscious business model" that involved both selling products and creating public service announcements to build awareness for disaster relief.

"That's the future," he says. "Kids being analytical and creative to come up with solutions for us all."

Not set in stone

The good news for parents of children who seem predisposed to either a right- or left-brain orientation is that neither aptitude is set in stone, says Po Bronson, co-author with Ashley Merryman of NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, out in September.

Bronson says brain mechanisms controlling intelligence and creativity are in flux through age 25. "People told me as a kid that I had a math brain, and that I shouldn't write," says Bronson, a onetime Wall Streeter who went on to write five best-selling books.

"In the end, creativity is mainly an attitude," he says. "It's about coming up with an original answer to something as opposed to the one we've always seen."

Still, for those who display both left- and right-brain talents, the world is not yet their oyster.
Stephen Welch, 22, of Woodstock, Ga., is a graduate of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. An engineer and a guitar player, he has been accepted at the University of California-Berkeley's engineering program and Boston's Berklee College of Music. He fears either choice will deny one side of his identity; he plans to take a year off to think about it. "I'm struggling," he says. "I feel like it's an either/or situation."

Not so straightforward

That dilemma is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Reflecting on Bassett's presentation is Ben Quinones, a father of three girls under 10 who attend the private Children's Day School here. He half-jokes that the lecture "was inspirational, daunting and all about figuring out what you're doing wrong."

As a lawyer turned CEO of semi-conductor start-up Lakota Technologies, Quinones says he sees firsthand the importance of not only fact-driven left-brain skills, but also more intangible right-brain weapons of creativity and adaptability.

"Things were so different, so straightforward when I was in school," he says, almost wistfully. "But globalization is driving this. For my kids, simply grasping a set of left-brain skills will never be enough."