Ambidexterity or two-handedness and two-brainedness. An argument for natural development and rational education.

  • Jackson, John.
Date:
1905
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ambidexterity or two-handedness and two-brainedness. An argument for natural development and rational education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    discuss the possibility and the advisability of cultivating Ambidexterity as an essential factor and element of our National Education: and fourth, to briefly indicate how this consummation may best be brought about. Ambidexterity is so closely associated and identified with other branches of educational work in which the writer has been engaged for quite a number of years, that it has necessarily become incorporated with them, and has consequently been studied and practised alongside with Handwriting and Drawing,—the two most intellectual and important exercises that can occupy our hands at any time. There need be no apology, therefore, for devoting a separate chapter to each of those subjects. It is very encouraging, and matter for congratulation, that the twentieth century inaugurates a more favourable environment, and brings with it a much more advanced liberalism, and a spirit of earnest inquiry regarding the proposed innovation; for we have a by no means insigni- ficant minority of intelligent thinkers, both within and without the teaching profession, who are really desirous and determined to bring in the element of Bimanual Instruction, and to make it a fundamental part of our school routine, at any rate with a limited number of ordinary class subjects. So far as they go, this ambition and resolution are most praiseworthy, but of course the proposed reformation does not go nearly far enough ; hence those who take a broader view of the question are devoting all their energies to the propagation of an unlimited and all-pervading scheme of two-handedness that shall not be confined to any specified number of subjects ; but a system that shall include all branches and all departments wherever the employment of the two hands (separately or simulta- neously) could possibly come in. Naturally, then, the one grand object of these pages is to encourage and effect this most desirable revolution ; for the author firmly believes in the possibility of evolving a