Lefty universe - Left-handed products and curiosities
Phone 96 391 98 97
tonya@universozurdo.com
Search

results
  • product categories:
  • products:
follow us Follow Me on Instagram Follow Me on Pinterest facebookTwitter
actividades y noticias

A bit of left-handed history, of cursed geniuses ... 5

16/05/2018

V. HOW WAS THE LEFT BEING TRANSFORMED FROM A SYMPTOM OF MENTAL AND MORAL DEFICIENCY TO A SIGN OF CREATIVITY AND MENTAL STRENGTH?
 IN THE CLASSROOMS
At the beginning of the 20th century, educators saw left-handed students not as students, but as problems. Some teachers decided to recycle left-handed students to write with their right hands, even though babbling, dyslexia and emotional distress could result from doing so. This provoked a debate on how to respond to the leftist "problem" and a renewed interest in ambidextrous culture.
In 1914, for example, when a teacher posed the question to The Teacher magazine, "Should the left-handed child be required to write with his right hand?", He received a strong and varied response. Half said that the student must be educated to use the right hand; others said that the child should be allowed to write with the left hand, but was taught to do other things with the right hand, since this is a "right-handed world".
The century would continue to happen, but the theorization of the origins and destinies of the lefties would not.
In the 70s, the well-known psychologist Theodore Blau wrote that left-handed and "sinister" children were challenged academically and behaviorally, and willing to diseases such as schizophrenia. In the 80s and 90s, Stanley Coren would notice that left-handed people lived shorter and poorer lives, and that being left-handed was the result of "neurological failure or physical malfunction."
In other words, after all these centuries, the left was still "wrong", the twentieth century only allowed this supposed truth to be sold as a scientific fact.
WHAT THE LEFT HAND MEANS TODAY
While the jury is still outside of what exactly causes being left-handed, or if there is even a "cause" to be found, time has denied the validity of many historical explanations for it, and the expectations of it.
And yet, in some places the links of centuries of religious, scientific and pedagogical thought persist. In Taiwan, for example, researchers have found that approximately 60 percent of the left-handed students studied were forced to become drug addicts, and that forced conversion was more likely among lower-income households than higher-income households.
Perhaps we will reach the apex of erudition on the left when we treat it for what it is: meaningless. No, the lefties do not roar the thieves. Nor are they - as the linguist and author Rik Smits says - creative geniuses, as some experts have wanted to consider lefties during the last two decades. Rather, says Smits, they are simply people.
As Smits writes, "Few truly insignificant features receive as much attention as the left."

volver