I wrote a short piece on Howard Gardner for the TES this summer. They’ve been running a series on thinkers who have influenced education. I’m not sure why they asked me to do Gardner, but I was glad to oblige (I also volunteered, at my wife’s suggestion, to do Wendy Kopp: coming soon). It was a slightly odd experience, for two reasons. I’ve quite recently gotten to know Gardner, not very well, but well enough to make it a bit awkward if I had a negative assessment of his work (I don’t, far from it). The other is that, whereas I imagine the TES editors assumed that, as an education professor, I would have come across Gardner’s work in the course of my professional life, that’s not true. In fact my dad told me to read his stuff, starting when I was in grad school. My dad is Gardner’s #1 promoter in the UK, so at least I got to know his work the same way many of the TES’s readers did. Here’s the piece (I disavow any responsibility for titles, by the way).
Because of the word limit I had to cut a paragraph on Gardner’s book Good Work
Gardner recently wrote, rather ruefully: “My obituary is likely to read “The Father (or less respectfully, “The Guru”) of multiple intelligences””. Well, you might think, that’s nothing to complain about. But he has an enviable body of work beyond MI theory. Collaborating with William Damon and Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi he has authored studies of good work – “work that is at once excellent in its technical aspects, ethically responsible, and personally engaging” – investigating both what it is, and how to make it available in our current environment. Obviously, there’s a lot more detail to it than that: the studies are, like his work on multiple intelligences, rich and textured, grounded in a real appreciation of what human beings are like and a concern with how they flourish. Many lives would be better if employers, trades union negotiators, and workplace regulators paid just half as much attention to these studies as educationalists have done to MI theory.
{ 20 comments }
John Quiggin 09.04.08 at 10:32 pm
As a stereotypical fumble-fingered professor, I don’t need much convincing on the doubtfulness of g theory, at least when pushed beyond what can be inferred fairly directly from the fact that scores on different kinds of IQ tests are correlated .
On the other hand, I’m less convinced that anything is gained by calling all kinds of abilities “intelligence”. Arguably, that grants the presumption that intelligence is all that matters.
Matt 09.04.08 at 10:52 pm
It’s been a while since I read Gardner and I read more of his pop cog sci stuff (“The Mind’s New Science”) than his multiple intelligences stuff but, somewhat along the same lines of John above, it seemed to me that, at least to some degree, he’d just repeated the nativist line on intelligence several times. It’s good to see that there are many ways of being smart, and that there’s not just one general way, but at least in the stuff I’d read it looked like he had the same basic fallacy 9 times (or whatever it was) over again rather than moving beyond it. Is that wrong? It has been a long time since I read it.
leederick 09.04.08 at 10:59 pm
‘I asked Professor Gardner why he thought his theory had been so influential: “First of all, any educator knows that kids differ from one another on multiple dimensions and that IQ testing produces both false positives and false negatives.”‘
How can IQ testing produce a false negative if g isn’t true? Surely, if you say someone hasn’t got high g, and g doesn’t exist, then that’s not a false negative?
Personally, I think the success of MI is because it is pro-intuition and anti-psychometrics. That view of intelligence basically shifts power towards educators and away from psychologists. I don’t think it’s science, just a political tool.
weserei 09.04.08 at 11:31 pm
I think the meaning is that “false positive” = the kid tests well but doesn’t show much talent for anything besides taking tests and “false negative” = the kid tests poorly but demonstrates aptitude in actual tasks such as playing an instrument, multitplying numbers, writing convincing arguments, etc.
This is not to defend Gardner’s theory, which, though I’ll admit I haven’t heard much about, doesn’t seem to be on speaking terms with neurological research. Not that I’m a g-theorist, either.
peter 09.05.08 at 12:02 am
In response to John Quiggin’s: “I’m less convinced that anything is gained by calling all kinds of abilities “intelligenceâ€. “
It’s a long time since I read Gardner’s work, but I recall he simply did not CALL an ability an intelligence. Rather, he defined a set of reasonable features which he believed a human intelligence should exhibit, and then demonstrated that 7 (later 9) human abilities had these features. An axiomatic approach, in other words.
Witt 09.05.08 at 12:21 am
It is really important to remember that in the early ’80s, when Frames of Mind was published, in the mainstream US it truly was radical for a person in the educational industry to suggest that there were other characteristics that we might call “intelligence,” and other ways to measure them beyond IQ testing.
It’s easy to overlook this given the cottage industry in MI materials that has developed in recent years, many of them rather farfetched and dubious adaptations or extensions of Gardner’s ideas. But if you were around to see the anger and even fury that could be evoked from local school officials and others at the notion that Gifted & Talented as measured by the one and only test might not actually be THE measure of a child’s worth…it’ s pretty valuable that HG was putting his work out there.
Mike Huben 09.05.08 at 1:45 am
MI is plainly as fradulent as the old alchemical earth, air, fire, and water. The mind is composed of numerous specialized and interconnected components, more comparable to the 100+ chemical elements. Our uses of these components in groups to generate our behavior and intelligence is perhaps analogous to using elements in chemical compounds. We know from good science that the mind must be at least that complex.
David Hume gave us the simple test to discern such scientism.
“Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Lex 09.05.08 at 7:51 am
This is the same David Hume who wrote a Treatise on Human Nature and inspired Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments? Packages of bold and unsubstantiated [but far from valueless] assertion both of them. I suppose you’ve never considered that that might just be a smartass throwaway line?
Dan Simon 09.05.08 at 1:48 pm
I actually agree with most of the comments above. As an intellectual exercise, MI was a reasonable attempt–given our current alchemy-level state of understanding of human cognition–to establish a rough mapping between the latter and broad categories of human activity. As an educational philosophy, however, it serves mainly as an excuse to let kids goof around instead of doing academic work, on the grounds that they would thereby be developing one or another of their non-academic intelligences.
Harry 09.05.08 at 2:32 pm
Peter’s right: not all abilities are called intelligences, but rather several groups of abilities, grouped together on the basis of a range of empirical criteria, are singled out for that designation. There’s a further question whether “intelligences” was the best designation. I have a tin ear on these things, not caring what words get used as long as its clear what they designate; my guess is that Gardner used the only word readily available to him.
As for the educational implications: I think Dan’s worry is exactly why there was such fierce resistance to the idea early on (especially because, as I say in the article, people with authority in education tend to be people who were very well served by the traditional focus on “g”, not least because the world of authority over education is so immune to people who didn’t do well in school but did do well in other spheres like business, service, etc, returning to it). My understanding is that Gardner didn’t think much about the educational implications, so lost control over what got done with his theory (and quite right too — nobody should have “control”) but when he turned attention back to it has tried to impose some discipline. One reason I agreed to write the piece in a newspaper for teachers was to improve the understanding of the theory, and provide recommendations of Gardner’s work, so that a few teachers would turn to that and away from half-baked versions of it floating in the ether.
Western Dave 09.05.08 at 2:42 pm
As someone who is in the trenches (albeit at an independent school), I could care less whether it accurately represents what’s going on in kids’ brains. Rather, it gives me a way for me and my students to talk about how they study. (Flash cards not working? Try saying them out loud as you use them. Color coding not working? Try sorting into piles and then placing them in different places in your room etc. etc. etc.) MI doesn’t change what you learn, but it gives an entry place for talking explicitly about how you learn. Some people figure that out on their own just fine, others need some help and MI created a useful vocabulary for that discussion.
Jim 09.05.08 at 7:18 pm
“Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?… ”
Right……… There goes descriptive linguistcs, most of botany, most of biology, most of paleontology…………………
peter 09.05.08 at 8:00 pm
“Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?… â€
Right……… There goes descriptive linguistcs, most of botany, most of biology, most of paleontology…………………
. . . and also most pure mathematics in the 20th century (including the most abstract area, category theory), and perhaps half of all computer science ever done, and 75% of that being done currently . . .
Bill Benzon 09.05.08 at 10:57 pm
I’m biased about Gardner. I met him once and talked with him quite a bit on that occasion; I rather liked him. And he was kind enough to write superb blurb for my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil). I’ve found his early work (on kids and art) interesting and useful. I don’t think his multiple intelligences stuff is particularly deep, but I do think it is useful (and he did deal with the neural literature, albeit as it was two decades ago [ancient times]).
OTOH, I don’t know quite what to make of the mainstream IQ literature. That literature involves technical issues in which I am not competent. I’m unwilling to take that literature at face value. But I’m not willing simply to dismiss it either. Gardner’s multiple intelligences gives me something to think about while I’m betwixt and between.
But, as an analogy, ponder this: Consider automobiles, complex devices which we’ve created and understand at a fairly profound level. Reviews of autos typically list various performance measures. Consider, for example, acceleration. This or that auto accelerates from zero kph to 88 kph in, say, 5 seconds. Pretty zippy. Now, look into the auto and try to find the acceleration system. Where is it? Is it a discrete system? No, it’s not. And yet acceleration is a perfectly straight-forward measure.
Well, I figure that the relation between IQ and the underlying neural mechanisms is no more transparent than the relation between acceleration and the underlying electro-mechanical systems.
I that context, Gardner’s multiple intelligences are worth thinking about. He’s tried to identify functionally-coherent subsystems and that’s a reasonable thing to do.
Dan Simon 09.06.08 at 4:27 am
I think Dan’s worry is exactly why there was such fierce resistance to the idea early on (especially because, as I say in the article, people with authority in education tend to be people who were very well served by the traditional focus on “gâ€, not least because the world of authority over education is so immune to people who didn’t do well in school but did do well in other spheres like business, service, etc, returning to it).
Well, I could retort that the resistance crumbled later, when the field of education was taken over by fourth-rate intellects for whom jettisoning academics for art, music, sports and group therapy was a welcome relief. But let’s dispense with the ad hominem arguments, and tackle the actual issue at hand: is it not the case that Gardner’s theories have at times been used to justify a kind of “democracy of intelligences”, under which no skill which can be claimed to exercise at least one of Gardner’s intelligences can be declared less educationally relevant than any other? And isn’t that a terrible thing?
(Note that I have no objection to more practical, less foundational applications of MI–say, to teaching specific skills to people for whom they don’t come naturally at all–if such applications result in measurable improvements in educators’ ability to impart valuable skills and disciplines to students.)
MDHinton 09.06.08 at 9:07 am
Doesn’t the MI theory suffer from a beautiful irony?
Everyone knew already that different people had different abilities. The point of this theory seems to be to call them ‘intelligences’. Therefore, what Gardner is actually doing is criticising the common use of the word ‘intelligence’, where it means ‘q’ intelligence. But why does he want to call them ‘intelligences’? Because he labours under the prejudice himself that ‘intelligence’ is what matters; the very prejudice his theory seeks to dissolve.
Mike Huben 09.06.08 at 1:08 pm
Peter (#13), you seem to be forgetting that discrete mathematics lies behind much of modern science. Even descriptive science corresponds to enumeration of set members.
Gardner’s work does not even resemble descriptive science, and is soundly contradicted by vast amounts of cognitive science.
Gardner’s steadfast refusal to measure anything leaves his theory a basis of little more than hand-waving. A classic case of a theory that is so bad that it’s not even wrong. If I was to propose a “sexual intelligence” by Gardner’s standards, there’s be no way to disprove it that couldn’t apply to his other categories: only vigorous tutting from prudes.
novakant 09.06.08 at 2:44 pm
As an educational philosophy, however, it serves mainly as an excuse to let kids goof around instead of doing academic work, on the grounds that they would thereby be developing one or another of their non-academic intelligences.
Let’s look at the real world of people employed in the non-academic sector for a minute, shall we?
To succeed in the vast majority of jobs out there, it is much more important that students develop faculties such as intuition, curiosity, creativity and people skills, rather than having some curriculum rammed down their throat that will in many cases be more or less outdated by the time they graduate or of limited use in what they will actually do in their real jobs. Also, “goofing around” for a while can be very helpful in figuring out where your talents lie and once that is established, the motivational kick such a discovery provides will make the acquisition of the skills needed to fulfil their ambitions much easier for most people.
josh 09.06.08 at 11:15 pm
Thanks for this, Harry; it’s nice to know that we’re both the sons of Gardner fans. (Indeed, I should say that, since my father’s current work is premised on MI, I’m badly biased in Gardenr’s favour).
On the issue of how important, how original, and how scientifically valuable Gardner’s work is: from my own, idiosyncratic perspective, Gardner’s work seems to fit into the debate between proponents of what one could (uncreatively) call monistic and pluralistic conceptions of reason and (distinctly but often relatedly) human flourishing more broadly. The ‘monistic’ view, while always challenged by various philosophers and, later, scientific psychologists, had worked its way deeply into the assumptions of much social science; I.Q. was one example of this. What Gardner did, it seems to me, is either (depending on how convinced you are by his work) fit out the pluralist view in psychological (or, speaking more broadly, social-scientific) garb — or provide a compelling case, and solid evidence, for a pluralist view using the tools of psychology. Either way, this does seem to me an important service in advancing a perspective which I think is truer — and in encouraging a more humane approach to education which, as Harry says, has the potential to help more people lead a greater variety of satisfying lives.
(None of which is to denigrate the value or importance of those intelligences traditionally identified as ‘intelligence’; quite the contrary. I tend to agree that the ‘half-baked’ versions of MI have done a good deal of harm, of the sort that Dan Simon identifies. But then so has the model of education built on IQ tests!)
Western Dave 09.08.08 at 1:36 am
Re: Dan Simon’s comments. Phonics badly done leads to bad outcomes, whole language badly done leads to bad outcomes, combination approaches badly done lead to bad outcomes. The problem isn’t Gardner’s, the problem is cookie cutter curricula that designed by state legislatures and their minions. I have a PhD in History from a Big 10 University. Since I started conciously thinking about teaching to multiple intelligences, I have more students writing better and more sophisticated essays. Are MI real? Who cares. Oh, but history isn’t quantifiable (at least not the interesting parts), so maybe they don’t matter. But our Science department, which is heavily invested in MI (what are labs but kinesthetic learning?), dominates Science Fair prizes and half our students go on to be science and engineering majors at the most competitive colleges. (And btw, it’s a girls school so this is pretty unusual).
Comments on this entry are closed.