Multiple Intelligences

Talented students are all too rare. Sure there are those students who are talented in some areas but not others - the athlete who never makes it past Algebra I; the videographer who is paralyzed by public speaking, the thespian who cannot write up a lab. However, students who are talented in all the activities offered at school are highly unusual.

Of course there are many more areas in which students might have talent that are not offered by school; e.g., acupuncture, finance, embalming, and parenthood to mention only a few.

So how do some of us grow up to be talented in the art of feng shui as opposed to engineering? In a word, intelligence.

Until only recently intelligence used to mean Intelligence Quotient (IQ), which was an attempt to quantify a variety of cognitive abilities into a single measure. But, as in any single measure of anything (achievement, patriotism, sexiness, etc.), an IQ score can be seriously misleading, for we all know those, like my egghead friend Rick, who can do the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in six minutes but who can barely dress himself for Sunday Mass.

In fact, there is not just one intelligence, there are multiple intelligences. It was Howard Gardner, Harvard professor of Psychology and Education, who in 1993 published Multiple Intelligences, a revolutionary work in which he articulates a series of intelligences that govern our personal and professional achievements.

The seven intelligences Gardner defines are as follows: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

If I had perfect pitch, could carry a tune, or had any rhythm whatsoever, I might be blessed with musical intelligence. This intelligence usually manifests itself early and gave rise to the genius of Mozart who composed piano pieces at six and his first opera at 14.

Dancers, mimes, and the blind all boast a high degree of bodily- kinesthetic intelligence, the ability to control one's body in space. In today's society, where athletes can command vast amount of money and attention, this athletic intelligence is highly prized.

Logical-mathematical intelligence is the ability to observe the relationships between phenomena and to categorize them appropriately. The ability of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man to count Blackjack cards is an extreme example of this kind of intelligence.

Authors, lyricists, and translators all possess variations of linguistic intelligence or the ability to manipulate language (politicians do the same but for widely-varying motivations).

My partner can walk into an empty room and tell me exactly where the couch should go, on what walls the art should be hung, and if our Oriental will fit. In my defense, I point out that growing up the daughter of an architect probably enhanced her natural spatial intelligence; but then again, unlike me, she never gets lost on a road trip.

Though politicians, used car salesmen, and Lotharios have bad reputations, the successful ones are successful because they score high in interpersonal intelligence. The capacity to relate to other humans - for votes, for profit, or for romance - is perhaps one of the most essential intelligences for us social beings.

Finally, intrapersonal intelligence suggests the ability to, as the ancient precept enjoins, "Know thyself." Anyone willing to keep a journal, to meditate, or to go to confession probably knows herself or himself pretty well.

Gardner failed to take into account the emotional elements of intelligence (an omission later rectified by Daniel Goleman in his Emotional Intelligence), and there are no doubt other intelligences yet to be proposed. Regardless, Gardner did all of us - especially students and educators - a favor in providing a framework for explaining why we're not all talented at everything.

That explanation is that we are all different; different people have different intelligences, and different intelligences enable us to learn differently and to achieve success differently.

This all may seem most obvious to educators because we have always known that individuals learn differently and that students possess a variety of talents - some mathematical, some athletic, some linguistic, some spatial, and some comedic.

The challenge for educators is to identify ways in which we can nurture multiple intelligences. In the current educational climate of prescribed curriculum and standardized testing, educators have a moral responsibility to use their multiple intelligences in order to ensure that the various intelligences of individual students are recognized and cultivated.

--Steve McKibben
5/21/06