Alternative Education: Integrating the right and left brain
In primal societies as well as tribal societies, children have always learned naturally from grandparents, parents and elder siblings by accompanying them to the market, to the jungle, to the river, or to the fields. Children have always been allowed almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own.
While primal people functioned primarily with their right brain, the hemisphere associated with intuitions, imagination, instinct, subconscious, the civilized world has been relying on the left brain, the rational, logical brain … 6000 years back something happened that brought about this shift in our way of functioning. This shift led to a cascade of discoveries and inventions, new technologies, science… and with that the institution called SCHOOL.
In this 3 hour talk, we will attempt to reply to the following questions:
- how our obsession with the intellect has had a deep impact on our Psyche?
- how the shift from right (yin) to left (yang) brain has brought the shift from Partnership Learning as we see in indigenous communities, to State Education, a model that ushered in domineering child-rearing practices?
- how the transition from right brain to left brain has traumatized us beyond anything we have experienced thereafter?
- how an alternative model of education could bring about a reconciliation of the right and left brain? In nature, all cycles honor, contain and integrate antinomies/oppositions as each transform into the other in a continual cycle of change.