Multiple Intelligences
OVERVIEW
Think for a moment about a group of your friends, your neighbours or colleagues. Almost certainly there will be ways in which they are very similar – but there will also be differences. Some will be very organised, their CDs arranged neatly in alphabetical order. Others will be the kind of people you turn to in a crisis. Yet others will have lots of ideas and opinions and be able to argue their case really well.
Now think of a group of children – perhaps the ones in your child’s class. They, too, will have similarities but they will also be very obviously different. One child prefers to be on the climbing frame. Another makes up songs. A third is always talking. A fourth likes to put everything in its place. A fifth spends most of her time at the painting table or finding out just how something works. Some will spend their time playing together; others will be quite happy doing things on their own. Some will leap about on the playground equipment; others will spend time painting or collecting interesting leaves and stones.
As they get older, these differences show themselves in more complex ways. The child on the climbing frame becomes a gymnast. The child who wrote songs becomes a good pianist or fiddler. The child who spent time at the painting table starts to draw or sculpt. You may have wondered how such differences develop.
Intelligence and your child
‘Have you spent any time with Samir? He’s so bright!’
‘Yes, and so is Wendy. She’s much more intelligent than my little boy.’
You might have had similar kinds of conversations or thoughts. It’s very difficult not to compare our own children with others… and then to wonder whether our children are intelligent or not. There’s still a great deal of discussion about what that word means.
There’s a lot of argument and debate about what intelligence actually is. Traditionally, children in this country who are good at maths and language activities have been called ‘intelligent’.
Research and the brain
Howard Gardner, an American brain researcher and psychologist, has shown that each of us develops different sets of connections in our brains. These connections come about as a result of our experiences but also as a result of the make-up we inherited from our parents and grandparents. So some of us are wired to think better in words, others of us to be more physically able.
Gardner’s research has shown eight different kinds of wiring – eight different kinds of ways to produce things and therefore eight different kinds of intelligence. Gardner says that intelligence is the ability to make or do something that other people value. If this sounds odd, think about it for a minute. If you are in the Western world, your abilities in terms of maths and writing are given high value. That’s why our intelligence tests focus on maths and English work. But if you’re a South Sea Islander, it might be your skills in navigation, using the stars, wind and sea patterns, and knowledge of bird behaviour that mark you out as intelligent. An appropriate intelligence test for the islanders would look a lot different from ours (unless the islanders wanted their children to go to Western schools, of course!).
Teams – and the benefits of variety
A recently published book claims that groups and teams of people always make better decisions than an individual on his or her own, no matter how bright the individual might be. This might seem obvious to you or it might seem strange. What if each member of the team seems nowhere near as bright as the individual. How could they come to a better decision?
The reason is fairly simple. Most good decisions are made when a number of different factors are taken into account. We need to look at issues in a number of different ways to work out what is really going on. Taking a one-sided view, however thorough it might be, is unlikely to give us the most complete answer to our problem. And no one single person is likely to be able to consider every single point of view.
Multiple intelligences
Why is that? Because, as we were saying earlier, our brains are wired in a number of different ways – so the way your brain is wired affects the way you see the world and make sense of it. If, for example, you have a very logical brain you might be able to work out all the stages needed to solve a problem but might not take into account the feelings of other people, which might, after all, be a key factor in the problem. It’s the people who have an interpersonal brain who can do that. So the two of you working together will almost certainly come up with a better solution than one of you working on your own.
These different wirings are known as our multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, whom we mentioned earlier, has identified eight very different ways in which our brains work. He has also found that we each have different strengths among the eight. So you might be stronger mathematically-logically, but weaker musically; stronger linguistically but weaker spatially, and so on.
This work, carried out over the past 30 years, has represented a real breakthrough in our understanding of intelligence. New technology and new ways of investigating the brain have increased our knowledge of how it works. Some researchers even say that 95% of what we know about the brain has been learned in the past 15 years. Significantly, many of the definitions of intelligence were made when we had to guess at what was happening in the brain. Now we know much more, our definition of intelligence has to change.
In Conclusion
Put simply, Howard Gardner has discovered that when children and adults ‘do’ maths there is a particular ‘pathway’ that works in the brain. The bigger and faster this pathway the better you’re likely to be at maths.
There’s a similar, but different, pathway for language work, too. This makes sense. We have always known some children who are good at one but not the other and the idea of these pathways helps to explain why. But Gardner has shown that there are six other major pathways (or intelligences) too – each one is different but they work similarly. We all have a mixed bag of abilities in each of the areas for which there is a pathway.
So our children and their classmates will behave in different ways, and like different things, as we observed at the beginning of this article, and how their different pathways are developed will ultimately determine their particular strengths and interests in later life. As the set of articles demonstrate, there is an importance to be attached to every one of the intelligences – and we as parents can help to develop them all! What’s more, we believe in encouraging children to be honest with themselves and discover weaknesses to work on as well as strengths to cultivate.