The Importance of Right-brain Thinking in Education

A designer from Frog Design works with 8th graders on solving a design problem: backpacks that work given lockers off limits.

So far so good and uh oh. During the process she notices something about the way they think that has implications for the future of human thinking moving forward:

“The kids were great. They were earnest and curious. And to say they captured my heart would be an understatement.

However, teaching them revealed a stark illustration of the situation we’re facing in education, at least from my point of view as a designer. The skills or intuition I assumed they had for drawing, observation, and building were alarmingly underdeveloped. In short, any in-born human willingness to experiment, cut, glue, break, build, or paint, had atrophied.

I had set out to teach design as a problem solving process (which it is!) but along the way I had forgotten that it is also a frame of mind—and I mean that almost literally. In design, thinking “differently” is paramount. Often, that is achieved through expressions like building, drawing, tinkering. Using your hands to build, draw, and tinker takes the problem out of your head, or as some science might indicate, from one side of your head to the other. The education system, for myriad reasons valid and otherwise, has abandoned “right-brained” skills. Our culture of education has never put a lot of emphasis on these things, but as budgets for the arts, physical education, and drama dwindle, it seems to be getting worse. This is not just affecting students’ ability to make a drawing or perform a play, it is affecting their ability to solve problems of all kinds because it limits the practice they get at engaging these other parts of their brains. That engagement is what leads to new thinking. That engagement is creativity.”