Educational Implications of Cerebral Lateralization

Abstract

Modern society is composed of a complex institutional order that emerged from the traditional solidarities such as tribe and family that constituted pre-modern society. The moral costs and benefits of this process have been the subject of social scientific discourse and artistic creation. Politics in modern society became the principal activity for integrating the modern institutional order, after the eclipse of traditional forms of social authority. The educational institution developed to provide the social space in which political socialization could occur. It seems impossible to conceive the modern nation state without the educational institution; and nations committed to modernization initiate the process with a system of mass education. As Silvert and Reissman (1976:7) propose in their cross-national study of the effects of education: Formal educational in national societies is the institution fundamental to preparing persons for autonomous participation in secular and relativistic politics. The effect of education makes possible individual democratic activity in national societies. In such societies formal education is a crucial element in creating both the grounds of the conflict and the ability to perceive it. The location of the educational institution at the heart of modern society suggests the problematic of how educational systems function to produce practices that contribute to societal integration. The educational system reproduces and legitimates the division of labor in economies stratified by class divisions and class politics (Bourdeau and Passeron, 1977; Habermas, 1970; Bernstein, 1975). Less understood is how the educational system affects the interior life of the individual-how the body as well as the body politic are fashioned by educational institutions. As Freud first pointed out, and Deleuze and Guattari (1975) recently elaborated, socialization always involves the interior territory as well as "the territory of the class domain; socialization entails intervention of society upon the physiological functioning of the body-such as, the mouth, the anus, and the genitals. This "primitive" socialization has been historically and remains largely the function of . the family. However, the educational institution in modern society has moved toward socializing the "highest" and most distinctively human organ, the brain. The marking and conditioning of the brain in modern society by the educational institution, and the individual effects of such conditioning, constitute the subject of this paper. It is argued that education provides not only the ground for integration of society by political activity, but the ground for the integration of the individual with his or her body, with the health and effective neurophysiological functioning of the individual.