Question: How do left-ness and right-ness in Human Design affect the traditional educational system?

Ra Uru Hu: One of the major problems we have in education is that it is based on a methodology that is rooted in, what in Design terms is called, the Strategic.

Basically, we are part of an evolutionary process. If we go back in our family tree to the Neanderthal, we go back to a creature that was entirely Right. That is, they were deeply Receptive. Everything about their nature was about being in tune with their environment, being in tune with nature.

When Homo Sapiens appeared, the so-called modern man, they brought the other side of the coin. Modern man was purely strategic, which is about being focused and using our binary vision to create strategies based on what we see. To human beings this was an enormous advantage, as it gave us the capacity to control the world through mind.

Everything about the strategic approach is that you have to focus, you have to remember, and there are basic rules to how you progress. Since 1781, we've had a whole different mix genetically in human beings emerging on this plane, and half of them are coming in with a great deal of “right-ness”; the other side of the coin.

According to Human Design, the nine-centered being is what I refer to as “Homo Sapiens in Transitus.” That is, we are a transitional form; we’re actually moving towards a new right that ultimately will come. But us? We carry both left-ness and right-ness.

Right-ness is a deep, deep dilemma for children in school. They are not designed to focus; they’re not designed to be strategic. The majority of school programs are rooted in the strategic approach. They always have been, because the educational systems, the way we have developed our teaching programs, are all rooted historically in this strategic approach.

And then we have all these children who are Right, and many of them are misunderstood by their teachers. They're not respected, they’re not considered to be as intelligent. The teacher may think they're perhaps a little more creative, but they don’t really see these children have the potential to be academic. And it’s simply because the Right doesn't perform in the same way.

The educational system today is devastating to those children who have a Right mind. It is something that can be easily dealt with, but it means there has to be an approach in which these children and their parents are educated. A right-minded child can be brilliant in school, as a matter of fact truly brilliant, but the rules for them are different, and it’s a dilemma in the classroom.

The right-minded child has to be present and pay attention. If they pay attention, they take everything in, they don't have to study if they take it all in. The left-minded child needs to focus, so they're only interested in certain things that the teacher says. They're not interested all the time, and when they're not interested, this creates problems.

That is, they get bored. They need something to do so they start fooling around, which distracts the right-minded students, who can then no longer be present and lose out on their process of taking everything in. The Left child can later go back and study those things they missed, but the Right can't do that.

If we’re going to change the way children can excel in terms of how they translate information, we will need a whole new approach in terms of separating the right and the left children, and teaching them literally in different ways.

Now, of course that's not going to happen. So what we end up with is, how good a job can we do in letting parents and teachers who are open to this knowledge, know to slowly begin this process of changing their approach. This needs to start at the home level so the child doesn't suffer from the reflection of the teaching system which impacts how parents look at their child.

You’ve got a right-minded child and the parent is told over and over that the child is not doing well, that they’re falling short. Over time, this will have a terrible impact on the child’s psychology. And you don't have to get these parents into Human Design, they just want to do something that's right for their children.

But again, it's a classroom problem because the right-minded child needs an environment without distraction; an environment that is simply stimulating where they are present and take things in. As a matter of fact, you can teach a right child in half the time you need to teach a left child. You're always making up for what the left have missed because they're focusing and missing out on things. They require totally different teaching techniques.

And the institutions, well… It means changing everything, and that’s not the way I think. I think one person at a time, one child at a time, one parent at a time in order to have that impact.

Ra Uru Hu was the Human Design System’s founder and messenger. Ra dedicated 25 years of his life to the development and teaching of the System around the world until he passed away in 2011.