Half-Brained Ideas about Education: Thinking and Learning with Both the Left and Right Brain in a Visual Culture

For centuries educators have focused on the printed and spoken word as the medium for transferring knowledge. This emphasis on speech and text has meant that the areas of the brain’s left hemisphere linked to these types of language processing are well exercised, while spatial reasoning, symbolic processing and pictorial interpretation, which seem to be tied to the right hemisphere, remain largely ignored. With the development of television and the microcomputer, print-based text no longer can monopolize our symbolic environment. The emphasis on text must be balanced by attention to graphic formats and the visual arts, by raising our consciousness of symbols, connecting text and graphics through language networks and creating a compatibility with our visual culture.