Not accustomed (yet!) to receiving praise in the national media, we were thrilled last week to be featured in the Huffington Post‘s education section, with an insightful profile by John M. Eger. Here, Eger applauds the value of arts education as a practice in classrooms across the nation, and credits Right Brain as: “…probably one of the largest [arts integration] efforts in North America, involving not just the arts and culture organizations, but all the schools, private donors, artists, local government, cultural groups and everyday citizens within the three counties.”

Eger served in the 1970s as an advisor to Presidents Nixon and Ford, and works now on faculty at San Diego State University—but his focus in not education. Rather, his subject matter is communications and public policy. And thus, the best part of this blog post is Eger’s ability to contextualize the relevance of Right Brain’s work to urban development on a grand scale. By teaching our youngest American generation to think boldly, he says, we will make them ready for the economy of the future.

“Our kids need to have the new thinking skills so in demand in an economy crying out for creativity and innovation,” Eger writes in this post. “Arts Integration, which is an essential ingredient in revitalizing a city, truly works. Only becoming an innovation economy, as President Obama has called for, will matter. This makes efforts such as The Right Brain Initiative vital.” 

Of course, these are points that we’ve been making all along. But it helps to have outsiders remind us that we’re on the right track, and that the significance of our work is as great as we believe it to be.

Read the full article here.
Read more of Eger’s thoughts on the value of arts integration here (“Art Integration and the Demand for Innovation”).