Eugenicists believed that intelligence was fixed at birth and could be identified by an IQ test that measured verbal and mathematical abilities. Today few scientists still believe that intelligence is static. There is too much evidence showing that scores on an IQ test can be raised or lowered by changing a test-taker’s environment. Psychologists, educators, and other researchers today also regard intelligence as far more complicated than language and mathematical skills. Howard Gardner, a psychologist who has done pioneering work on intellectual capacities, has identified the following intelligences:

Verbal-linguistic (People with this kind of intelligence enjoy writing, reading, telling stories or doing crossword puzzles.)
Logical-mathematical (Those with this kind of intelligence are interested in patterns, categories and relationships. They are drawn to strategy games and experiments.)
Bodily-kinesthetic (People with this kind of intelligence express themselves through drama, mime, dance, gesture, facial expressions, role play, and physical exercise.)
Visual-spatial (Individuals with this kind of intelligence think in images and pictures. They may be fascinated with mazes or jigsaw puzzles.)
Musical (Those who are musical are often aware of sounds others may miss. They tend to be discriminating listeners.)
Interpersonal (Individuals with this kind of intelligence are good at communicating and seem to understand others’ feelings and motives.)
Intrapersonal (People with this kind intelligence are very aware of their own feelings and are often self-motivated.)
Naturalist (Individuals who are able to recognize flora and fauna, to make other consequential distinctions in the natural world, and to use this ability productively in hunting, in farming, or in the biological sciences.)

In 1999, Stefanie Weiss of the National Education Association (NEA) interviewed Gardner about his theories for the group’s journal NEA Today. Her questions appear in italic type.

    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 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?
     . . . In my own work, I’m a proponent of teaching for understanding, which means going deeply into topics so that students can really make use of knowledge in new situations. This is very, very different from most teaching, where people memorize material and can reproduce it on demand but can’t make use of it in new situations. That’s what understanding entails. If you favor education for understanding the way I do, then MI [multiple intelligences] can be extremely helpful. Because when you are teaching a topic, you can approach the topic in many ways, thereby activating different intelligences. You can provide analogies and metaphors for different domains, invading different intelligences, and finally, you can present the key ideas in a number of different languages or symbol systems, again activating different intelligences.
     But obviously you can’t do that if you’re going to spend five minutes on a topic and then move on to something. Then you’re almost constrained to present it one way, which is usually verbally, and to give people a short-answer test. . . .

    Can standardized tests ever hope to measure children’s full intelligence?
     I’m not in favor of tests that are designed to measure people’s intelligence, because frankly I don’t care what intelligence or intelligences people have. I care whether they can do things which we value in our culture. What good is it to know if you have an IQ of 90 or 110—or even if you can jack it up to 120 through a lot of training —if, in the end, you can’t do anything.
    I think our assessments ought to focus on the kinds of things we want people to understand, and they ought to give people a chance to perform their understandings. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you have an IQ of 160 if you sit around and do nothing. What’s important is whatever IQ you have or whatever profile of intelligences you have, that you can demonstrate knowledge and understanding of things that matter.

    So do you think the high-stakes testing movement that we’re seeing now is going to force people to abandon different approaches to teaching?
     Yes. Current approaches almost inevitably push people to teach to the test, because those tests are so high-stake both for students and for teachers. Now, in principle, one could have assessments which probe understanding, and they could even be standardized. I would be much more in favor of those assessments. But those assessments would have to give people lots of choices. Because, say you’re doing American history, you have to say to people, “I want you to discuss, let’s say, the role of immigration in America, but you can discuss it with reference to any one of 20 different groups or 20 different issues.” If, on the other hand, you require people to know all 20 different groups and all 20 issues, then obviously, they can’t know very much about any one of them. It’s just a very superficial, Jeopardy-style knowledge.
    Now let’s be clear about this: Assessment is fine. Even standardized assessment is fine, if it looks at things which are important and allows us to probe in-depth what people understand. . . .

    How do you respond to those who say that MI theory is appealing, but there’s no proof to back it up?
     There’s no short answer to that question. To begin with, it’s a scientific theory, and so it needs to be evaluated on the basis of the science on which it draws. And I think it does quite well in terms of the scientific evidence, even the evidence that’s accumulated since the theory was first propounded 20 years ago.¹

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Connections questions for the classroom...

• Howard Gardner makes two claims. The first is that all human beings have all of the intelligences he cites and that 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.” How is his view of intelligence similar to the one held by eugenicists (Chapter 5)? How does it differ? How important are the differences?
  
  
• Gardner says of intelligence tests, “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you have an IQ of 160 if you sit around and do nothing. What’s important is whatever IQ you have or whatever profile of intelligences you have, that you can demonstrate knowledge and understanding of things that matter.” Based on your study of the history of racism and the eugenics movement, what evidence can you find to support Gardner’s view? To challenge that view? What do your own experiences with IQ tests add to his insights?
  
  
• Gardner does not discuss the consequences of intelligence tests based solely on verbal and mathematical abilities. Find out more about those tests and how they have shaped schools in the past and the way they still affect schooling today. Share your findings with your classmates. To what extent do schools in your community still reflect the kind of categorizing and ranking that marked education in the 1900s? What do your findings suggest about the legacies of the eugenics movement?

¹ “Meet Howard Gardner: All Kinds of Smarts,” complete interview by Stefanie Weiss. NEA Today Online. http://www.nea.org/neatoday/9903/gardner.html