Multiple Intelligences - An Interview With Howard Gardner
the book, I show how to take three topics, one from science (the theory of evolution), one from the arts (the music of Mozart), and one from history (the Holocaust), and really engender deep understandings by taking an MI approach very seriously. It's not only what I mentioned earlier the entry points, the analogies, and the model languages but also giving students lots of different ways of showing how they understand something.
I was once interviewed on radio about MI. I said I bet you could teach about the Civil War using dance, and I got lots of hate mail. I thought about it for a while, and I thought about the Spanish Civil War and the painting Guernica. And I said I bet you more people understand more about the Spanish Civil War from Picasso's Guernica than from reading the textbook on the topic. Almost anything can be illuminated in surprising ways if you open up your mind to the variety of intelligences.
Where is it said that the only way to learn about something is to read a chapter on it and answer a set of short-answer questions? Certainly in other countries, they don't do that. But part of our numerical, standardized test bias is many people think that's the only way to show something. And the greatest paradox is that people who were often the worst students when they were young are the ones who believe that the strongest, whereas people who were better students, who had more of a liberal arts education, understand that the questions we ask are more important than the answers that we come up with, and the more ways that we can think about something, the deeper our understanding is.
What do you say to people who say that linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences are more important than the other six?
There's no question that if you have a certain combination of language and logic, you're going to be facile in handling the kinds of tests we usually give, and as long as you stay in school, you'll think you're smart. If you ever should walk out into the street, you might be in for a huge shock. Conversely, if you're not good in language and logic in school, you'll have a harder time because you'll think you're dumb, and you kind of have to get through school to show what it is that you can accomplish in
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