THEORY OF 'INTELLIGENCES' ULTIMATELY NOT VERY USEFUL

Saturday, May 22, 2004

At a fateful moment in writing his hugely influential book Frames of Mind, psychologist Howard Gardner says, he decided "to call these faculties 'multiple intelligences' rather than abilities or gifts."

As minor as the change seemed to be, it made all the difference. "I am quite confident that if I had written a book called Seven Talents it would not have received the attention that Frames of Mind received," Gardner said in a 2003 paper titled "Multiple Intelligences after Twenty Years" (available at www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/ HG_MI_after_20_years.pdf).

And what a lot of nonsense American education would have been spared as a result.

When Frames of Mind appeared in 1983, Gardner listed seven of these so-called intelligences: linguistic, logico-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. You needn't fuss about how precisely these are to be interpreted, because nobody else bothers to do that anyway.

Later Gardner added "naturalist" to the original seven, and in the paper he said he was sticking with his "8 1/2 intelligences" -- whatever a 1/2 intelligence is -- although he cheerfully concedes that others will propose more. He mentions, for example, existential, spiritual, sexual, digital and attention.

To be sure, Gardner is not to blame for the giddier efflorescences of his acolytes, for instance having a child with naturalist intelligence learn letters by making them out of twigs and leaves. But he doesn't exactly discourage them either. He cites in his paper the Key School in Indianapolis, which according to its Web site was started about two years after Frames of Mind was published, and whose curriculum is based on the principle, "Each child should have his or her multiple intelligences stimulated each day."

No one yet knew how multiple intelligences could be measured, let alone stimulated, or even whether they existed in any sense that justified the use of the term "intelligence." Indeed, it's far from clear that anybody knows those things now.

In the summer issue of the journal Education Next, published by the Hoover Institution, Daniel Willingham of the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia looks at the state of Gardner's theory as it evolved through two subsequent books, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory Into Practice (1993) and Intelligences Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (1999). The article is available at http://www.educationnext.org/20043/18.html online.

Willingham points out that Gardner contrasts his view with that of the majority of psychometricians, who favor "a general intelligence perspective." They do, but that doesn't mean they think intelligence is a single phenomenon (even if it is commonly assigned a single number).

Rather, the most widely accepted model is that people's performance on a wide variety of mental tasks is correlated, that the correlations tend to fall into clusters that can plausibly be described as verbal and mathematical, and that the further correlation between the clusters is the result of some underlying factor, conventionally called g (for general) intelligence.

Willingham doesn't stress the point, but it is important to know that psychometricians do not assign particular tasks to clusters ("This looks like a verbal task to me, Art!" and then go looking for correlations. The clustering is a mathematical property calculated from the correlation data. Gardner's theory, which emphasizes that the various intelligences are largely independent, doesn't adequately explain why this clustering occurs.

Given that people are, undeniably, smart in different ways, is Gardner's list of eight (or whatever) ways the best or the only one? I think it depends on the level of analysis. As a graduate student in mathematics, I knew -- we all did -- that mathematicians come in two basic flavors, algebraists and geometers (mathematicians will forgive me, I hope, for simplifying). The former are especially strong in what Gardner calls logico-mathematical intelligence, and the latter in spatial intelligence, and the difference is quite marked, even if you're all just sitting around the math common room playing bridge. But if you compare mathematicians with the rest of the population, the difference is insignificant; they're all much more like each other than they are like other people.

The criteria for deciding what is an intelligence aren't specific enough to determine whether this collection of abilities should be one intelligence or two.

The intriguing question, Willingham says, is why teachers were so eager to adopt this theory, and to put it into practice lacking any evidence that it worked. After all, he asks, what teacher "didn't know that some kids are good musicians, some are good athletes, and they may not be the same kids?"

Of course children learn differently, but elevating a spectrum of talents and abilities to "intelligences" leads teachers to believe the differences are greater than in most cases they are. In the end, Willingham concludes, Gardner's theory is simply not all that helpful.