While this latest work was not created to specifically address isues in Special Education, anyone who has worked with children with special needs will find themselves nodding their heads in agreement with most anything Howard Gardner has to say. The following interview is reprinted here with the permission of the NEA.
Can you give a shorthand version of your theory of multiple intelligences?
Multiple intelligences is a psychological theory about the mind. It's a critique of the notion that there's a single intelligence which we're born with, which can't be changed, and which psychologists can measure. It's based on a lot of scientific research in fields ranging from psychology to anthropology to biology. It's not based upon based on test correlations, which most other intelligence theories are based on.
The claim is that there are at least eight different human intelligences. Most intelligence tests look at language or logic or both those are just two of the intelligences. The other six are musical, spatial, bodily/kinestheic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.
I make two claims. The first claim is that all human beings have all of these intelligences. It's part of our species definition. The second claim is that, both because of our genetics and our environment, no two people have exactly the same profile of intelligences, not even identical twins, because their experiences are different.
This is where we shift from science to education. If we all have different kinds of minds, we have a choice. We can either ignore those differences and teach everybody the same stuff in the same way and assess everybody in the same way. Or we can say, look, people learn in different kinds of ways, and they have different intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Let's take that into account in how we teach and how we assess.
So how should teachers who believe in your theory change their approach to teaching?
Multiple intelligences (MI) is a tool. It's not a goal. That means that you have to decide what you want to teach, and that should be based on what you think is important. Nowadays often it's other people who are telling us what to teach. That's not what I favor. But whoever makes the decisions, once those decisions are made, that's when MI can come into action.
