To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books Jan. 5, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/2000/01/05/gardner Future Smart Seventeen years ago, a Harvard psychologist proposed seven types of intelligences. His new book argues for eight and a half. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Annie M. Paul "My students have often asked me whether there is a cooking intelligence, a humor intelligence or a sexual intelligence," Howard Gardner dryly relates. "They have concluded that I can recognize only the intelligences that I myself possess." Whatever faculties he may be lacking, the many intelligences Gardner can claim are on full display in his newest book, "Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences For the 21st Century" (Basic Books, $27.50). It's been almost 17 years since the Harvard psychologist published the groundbreaking "Frames of Mind," which argued that intelligence doesn't come in a single flavor, but in several -- seven, in fact. He contended that our test-obsessed, hierarchy-happy culture has elevated logical and linguistic intelligence above the musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intra- and inter-personal intelligences. In other words, we value the capacity to turn a phrase or solve a problem more than the ability to execute a pirouette, exhibit perfect pitch or make a new friend, although the latter activities are just as cognitively challenging. Gardner's theory was a huge hit in education circles, and its precepts have been applied in hundreds of classrooms and school districts around the world. The idea has also entered the public discourse, influencing our debates on school curriculums and standardized tests. Now Gardner has returned to stake a claim for multiple intelligences in the coming century -- a time, he says, when we'll need all the brainpower we can muster. "Intelligence Reframed" is a progress report on how we've assimilated the concept of multiple intelligences. Sitting in his publisher's Manhattan office, the cordial, slightly rumpled professor spoke with Salon about why IQ tests are inadequate, why he doubts there's a spiritual or a moral intelligence and why we may radically change our thinking about the kind of people we consider intelligent. Much of your latest book is devoted to explaining and defending the theory of multiple intelligences. Has it become a kind of Frankenstein, a monster that you have to spend all your time managing and controlling? I don't spend all my time managing and controlling it, and I give myself some points for that. No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three other people in our field. So when you suddenly find the world catching on to something you did, it's tempting to devote yourself to it and be afraid to change your mind about it because you'll lose your industry. I've tried very hard not to commodify multiple intelligences. There are hundreds of products such as CD-ROMs and summer camps based on the idea out there, but I don't endorse any of them. And I avoid singling out people whose work I don't like -- with one exception. In Australia, they had an educational program in which they linked each of the intelligences to a particular ethnic group. I thought that was heinous, and I went on television and said so. Most academics are naive in thinking that their ideas won't be noticed, and if they are noticed, they'll be understood correctly. Boy, have I been disabused of that notion. One of the purposes of the book is to address some myths that have proliferated around multiple intelligences, such as a single "approved" educational approach based on multiple intelligences theory. In some cases, the myths are ones that I propagated. In the naive view, a theory is something that's created at one time in one space, and remains static. In fact, the theory has changed enormously in terms of my own understanding of it. The big news in this book is that you've added an intelligence to the list, one that you call the "naturalist intelligence," the ability to recognize and classify features of the environment. What led to that decision? I was giving a speech to specialists in the history of science at Harvard, and one of them said, "You'll never explain Darwin with your theory." And he was right. So I spent the next several years reading about how people recognize patterns in nature, how they discriminate among living things and things that are inorganic but natural, like rocks or clouds. All of the intelligences have to be traced back to life on the savanna a couple hundred thousand years ago, because we evolved for a very different kind of world than the one we live in now. We had to decide what to eat and what to avoid because it was poisonous, what to chase and what to run from. If we couldn't make fine distinctions in the natural world, we'd be done for. One speculation I make in the book is that our current consumer culture may be based upon the naturalist intelligence. A consumer culture assumes that we can tell one sneaker from another, the taste of one kind of coffee from another -- and if we didn't have a naturalist intelligence, we couldn't do that. You considered adding a spiritual intelligence, but ultimately decided against it. Why? The more I investigated spirituality as it's used in our society, the more I became convinced that even if it's terribly important, it's not an intelligence. Spirituality is just a mess intellectually. If you go into a bookstore and look at all the titles labeled "spiritual," they range from total nonsense to very serious literature about religion and contemplation. The study of spirituality does bring up an interesting phenomenological issue: What does it mean to be in a spiritual state? Many people would say that what's important about spirituality is the feeling that comes with it. The problem is that we don't know how to measure people's feelings because they're not quantifiable. In mathematical intelligence, for example, we're interested in how well people can compute. How they're feeling at the time is irrelevant. They could be feeling lousy or wonderful -- it's how well they compute that matters. When you start making a subjective feeling part of the definition, it gets very slippery. Can people be spiritual only if they feel a certain way? If David Koresh feels that way, does that make him spiritual? If the pope doesn't, does that make him unspiritual? So it's very hard to find dry land, and scientists are looking for dry land. But you think that one aspect of spirituality -- the contemplation of existential matters -- may qualify as an intelligence? Existential intelligence denotes our capacity to ask very big questions about the meaning of life and death. We know that people all over the world ask these questions, and art, religion, philosophy, mythology are all efforts to deal with them. Even kids ask them, sometimes directly, sometimes through storytelling and play. Most of the intelligences are linked to tangibles like objects or other people, but existential intelligence deals with intangibles. When I reviewed existentiality in terms of my criteria for an intelligence, the one point on which I was dissatisfied is that we haven't found a part of the brain dedicated to dealing with these questions. So I say that I think there are "eight and a half" intelligences. Can you think of an example of existential intelligence in action? In my earlier writings about leaders, I emphasized the importance of linguistic intelligence and personal intelligence, and the relative insignificance of logical intelligence. That's why someone like Reagan can be a very effective leader, although no one ever accused him of being logical. To those, I would now add existential intelligence, because people like leaders who can help them make sense of what's happening in the world. The leaders we admire most are ones who give answers to big questions. When you think about who's running for president, it's a pretty sorry lot in that regard. You also rejected the possibility of a moral intelligence. Why? Morality involves value judgments, and I want my intelligences to be value-neutral. Yet I'm very interested in how intelligences can be used for moral ends. It's important that people keep a sense of calling at a time when things are changing very quickly; the market is very powerful, and technology is revamping our whole sense of space and time. Young people entering a profession need to find or invent the institutions that will allow them to do what they think is really important, and not let the current practices dictate their actions. I think journalism is more at risk than any other profession. It's caught between the tastes of the public, which are capricious at best, and the pressures of shareholders, who don't say, "Oh, what a wonderful editorial," but rather, "Did we make more money than last quarter?" It's extremely difficult for journalists to do what they claim they want to do, which is to tell the truth, to be as objective as they can and to report on the things that people should know about, rather than the things they want to know about. A journalist recently said to me, "The media are an early warning sign. What you see happening in the media is going to happen in every other profession." And I think he's absolutely right. Does the value placed on particular intelligences vary among different cultures and eras? Yes, absolutely. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, you were going to a place where you would study Greek, Latin and Hebrew. And I'm absolutely certain that people who could learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew then are not the same as the people who nowadays would do well on the SAT. In China, as part of the extensive classical examination system, scholars wrote intricate essays that had to conform to a schema that was described as "eight-legged." Whereas in Western Europe, cultural literacy was very important, and you had to know about the paintings of a particular culture and so on. My work is very critical of what I call "the dipstick theory," which is the notion that everybody is born with a certain amount of intelligence and it doesn't matter where or when you live, how much stuff you have will show. So if you were smart in the Paleolithic era, you'd be smart today, and if you were smart in the Middle Ages, you'll be smart in the year 2050. I think that's nonsense. I think we're built with different kinds of potentials, and whether they get realized depends on what's available in society. When something like a computer, or a printing press, or telecommunications gets invented, there is always a shakeup of which intelligences are valued and nurtured. As new technologies develop, it's completely unpredictable which intelligences will come to the fore. For example, the arts have had a very hard time in American education for the last 30 or 40 years. But one can easily imagine a scenario in which computers become smarter than us, and the only people left who can do anything of worth to other people will be the artists. How will our ideas about intelligence change in coming years? The biggest change I foresee will be the extent to which we will want to know about the intelligences of each person and how we will utilize that information. As long as we rely on a universal yardstick such as the SAT or the IQ, we dismiss individual differences. In the future, computers will make it easier to ascertain individual intelligences and implement different ways of learning. Those companies and educational institutions that figure out how to learn about an individual's intelligences profile and use it profitably will have a tremendous advantage. The notion that there's only one way to teach and one way to learn and one way to assess ability will look increasingly silly. My work with multiple intelligences is not about accepting what is, but envisioning a different view of human nature and human potential. We're living in a time that is impatient with subtlety and complexity, and we would like to say: This is the test that will measure intelligence, this is the kind of intelligence we value and this is the ultimate curriculum. But I'm convinced that in 50 or 100 years, we will laugh at any teacher who thinks there's only one way to teach something. How might measures like the SAT or the IQ test be changed to reflect an appreciation for multiple intelligences? The best way to find out what people can do is not to test for some essence by asking a series of questions, but rather to put them into a situation that mirrors the one they will encounter in real life, and see how they handle it. I call these intelligence-fair assessments, and I think it's no longer fantasy to think that we could do simulations like that. We should go right for the retail, rather than thinking there's some kind of wholesale quantity that will simplify the problem for us. If I were an admissions officer, I'd want to know: Is this a student who's going to be able to participate in class in a way that's critical, but not nasty? Is this somebody who can not only find flaws in an argument, but say how they would improve that argument? We should make our theories of intelligence adequate to the complexity of human thought and accomplishment, rather than try to take all that and squeeze it into one very narrow slot. salon.com | Jan. 5, 2000