Left-Brain Thinking Only Went Out With Shoulder Pads and Big Hair

I hated school as a kid. The majority of work I had to do made very little sense to me. It was work that I wasn’t very good at or interested in. There were, however, a few classes I really liked and excelled in. These were the big-picture classes that connected class material to the world outside the school building. A few of these classes were: English, because I was learning about human behavior through stories; Photography, because the assignments forced me to look at the world with new eyes; Ethical Issues was a blast because it was driven by interaction and made you explain your thoughts and views; and Biology, because almost everything we learned could be applied to everyday life. Aside from English and Biology, the classes I most enjoyed were half year electives and weren’t considered Important.

I grew up in an affluent suburb and went to high school in the 80’s when the expectation of an MBA became the norm, if you hadn’t already decided on medical or law school. So of course the classes that were considered Important were the ones that would get me into a good college (read Ivy League), and were the very classes that made the least sense to me. Between the math classes that were Greek to me, and movies like, Secret of My Success and Working Girl, the one thing I learned for certain was that I wanted no part of Corporate America. But to hear my guidance counselor tell it, there was nothing else to consider. The entire make-up of my high school emphasized what Daniel H. Pink refers to as “knowledge work” in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future.

The world has changed a lot since the 80’s. Unfortunately, the standardized testing craze in school today keeps the emphasis on “knowledge work.” In the following excerpt from A Whole New Mind, Pink explains three reasons why “knowledge work” is no longer king.

Abundance
Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and executives [referred to as “knowledge workers”]. What distinguished this group from the rest of the workforce was their “ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge.” … Knowledge workers and their thinking style [left brain/L-Directed] have indeed shaped the character, leadership, and social profile of the modern age. Consider the tollbooths that any middle-class American must pass on his way to the land of knowledge work … the PSAT, the SAT, the GMAT, the LSAT, the MCAT. … These instruments all measure what is essentially undiluted L-Directed Thinking. They require logic and analysis – and reward test-takers for zeroing-in, computer like, on a single correct answer. The exercise is linear, sequential, and bounded by time. … They’ve created an SAT-ocracy – a regime in which access to the good life depends on the ability to reason logically, sequentially, and speedily.

In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must figure out how to get things to work. But if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them. There are too many other options. Mastery of design, empathy, play, and other seemingly “soft” aptitudes is now the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us much happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning. … abundance has freed literally hundreds of millions of people from the struggle for survival and, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert William Fogel writes, “made it possible to extend the quest for self-realization from a minute fraction of the population to almost the whole of it.”

Asia
In recent years, few issues have generated more controversy or stoked more anxiety than outsourcing. … programmers … throughout India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejeezus out of software engineers and other left-brain professionals in North America and Europe, triggering protest, boycotts, and plenty of political posturing. The computer programming they do, while not the most sophisticated that multinational companies need, is the sort of work that until recently was done almost exclusively in the United States-and that provided comfortable white-collar salaries of upward of $70,000 a year. Now twenty-five-year-old Indians are doing it – just as well, if not better; just as fast, if not faster-for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey. Yet, their pay, while paltry by Western standards, is roughly twenty-five times what the typical Indian earns-and affords them an upper-middle-class lifestyle with vacations and their own apartments.

Automation
Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left-brains. Management meta-guru Tom Peters puts it nicely, saying that for white-collar workers “software is a forklift for the mind.” It won’t eliminate every left-brain job. But it will destroy many and reshape the rest. Any job that depends on routines – that can be reduced to a set of rules, or broken down into a set of repeatable steps – is at risk. If a $500-a-month Indian chartered accountant doesn’t swipe your comfortable accounting job, Turbo-Tax will.

The thing is, back in the day, my high school was right for emphasizing “knowledge work.” It was what was what was in demand. But that was then. Today school is just as narrow in its thinking, if not more so. While society has changed, school is still stuck in that SAT-ocracy mindset of the last century. By continuing to treat students as a collective, they are ignoring the fact that there are more components to intelligence and ability then the ones that can be measured on standardized tests. Instead of creating a curriculum to keep up with the times, school is busy trying to force students into a 30-year-old mold that was shaped using ESEA/NCLB guidelines that are even more archaic.

When economies and societies depended on factories and mass production, R-Directed thinking was mostly irrelevant. Then as we moved to knowledge work, R-Directed Thinking came to be recognized as legitimate, though … secondary, to the preferred mode of L-Directed thinking. Now, as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan evolve once again, R-Directed Thinking is beginning to achieve social and economic parity – and, in many, cases, primacy. … L-Directed Thinking remains indispensable. It’s just no longer sufficient. In the Conceptual Age, what we need instead is a whole new mind.

We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time.

Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. These six senses increasingly will guide our lives and shape our world. Many of you no doubt welcome such a change. But to some of you, this vision might seem dreadful – a holistic takeover of normal life by a band of poseurs in black unitards who will leave behind the insufficiently arty and emotive. Fear not. The … abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our cave-person ancestors weren’t taking SAT’s or plugging numbers into spreadsheets. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always comprised part of what it means to be human. But after a few generations in the Information Age, these muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape. Anyone can master the six Conceptual Age senses. But those who can master them first will have a huge advantage. - A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

The US Department of Education is touting college and career-ready students as one of the guiding principles of the reauthorization of NCLB, but reading the Blueprint for Reform shows that they have clearly missed the boat.

Looking back now, I’ve come to understand that what I really hate about school is the one size fits all treatment of students, or for all you Star Trek fans, the Borg mentality that all will be assimilated. I agree with the foundation of school policy that ALL students can learn and need the opportunity to do so. But that’s about the only statement that can be applied to ALL students. There is a whole lot of lip service, both in and out of school, recognizing the inherent strengths and weaknesses and various learning styles in people. However, the reality is school doesn’t deal with people; it deals with students who are thought of as nothing more than a blob of dough to be formed with a politically decided cookie cutter.