In Education, You Need to Take Account of Different Types of Intelligence 63

MYTH 9

In Education, You Need to Take Account

of Different Types of Intelligence

In recent years, the educational world has been in thrall to Howard

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, first launched by this American
psychologist in 1983. According to Gardner, an intelligence is “a biopsy-
chological potential to process information that can be activated in a
cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in
a culture”. It is if we look at it in a clinical way not an ability to learn,
but an ability to process information through different intelligences, with
these different intelligences being represented in different parts of the brain.
Why is this idea so attractive to so many people? In part, because it
means that someone who fails to score well in a classic general intelligence
quotient (IQ) test may turn out to be intelligent in some other, more spe-
cific way. It transforms the idea that all children should have equal chances
to achieve all that they can achieve into an idea that all children are both
equal with respect to some form of intelligence while unique in that their
intelligences differ. It fits very well in the social-democratic philosophies
that have flourished since the middle of the last half of the previous cen-
tury, namely the essential equality of all people. One can see in this age
of anti-intellectual, anti-elitist populism the attractiveness of this idea
that there is not one “unfair” concept of universal intelligence “g”, but
rather that we are all Einsteins but in our own right.
Gardner identified the following intelligences:
• verbal/linguistic intelligence (word smart)
• mathematical/logical intelligence (maths smart)
• visual/spatial intelligence (picture smart)
• musical/rhythmical intelligence (music smart)
• bodily kinesthetic intelligence (movement smart)
• interpersonal intelligence (people smart)
• intrapersonal intelligence (self smart)
• naturalist intelligence (nature smart).
One important thing to be aware of is the fact that the things included in
this list are, according to Gardner, not fixed or permanent. Over time, new
intelligences may be added and redundant ones may disappear. The most
64 Urban Myths about Learning and Education

recent addition is existential intelligence (philosophically smart), meaning a

well-developed understanding of religion, philosophy and the meaning of life.
Teachers who follow this theory have done much valuable work,
because they recognize the differences in people. We would not dream of
criticizing the value of this work, but the foundations on which it is based
do seem to be rather shaky. In particular, there is one person who believes
that this theory has often been incorrectly interpreted in the educational
world, and that person is Howard Gardner himself!
A myth that irritates me is that people place my intelligences on the same foot-
ing as learning styles. Learning styles say something about how people
approach everything they do. If you are good at planning, people expect you to
have a plan for everything you do. My own research and observations lead me
to suspect that this is a wrong assumption.
If we are talking about multiple intelligences, we mean that we react indi-
vidually in different ways to different types of content, such as language, music
or other people. This is something completely different from a learning style.
You may think that a child is a visual learner, but you cannot say that
with my theory of multiple intelligences. I would say that you have a child who
is spatially aware, who has the ability to visualize things easily in space, and
that we can build on this strength if we want to teach the child something
new.
But this is not all. In the same interview Gardner complains about
other aspects of the way his theory is translated into educational practice.
Another myth that is widely believed is that, because we have seven or eight
intelligences, we need to develop the same number of different tests, so that
each child’s performance for each individual intelligence can be measured. This
is a perversion of the theory. It is falling into the same error as the classic IQ
test and then multiplying that error several times over. Personally, I am against
the measuring of intelligences, except when this is used for a specific learning
objective. For example, if we want a better understanding of the past history of
the child, or we want to help it with its maths or we want to map out what
might be a good starting-point for helping that specific child.
This interview dates from 1997, but in a 2013 opinion piece, Gardner
repeated the same refutation of learning-styles thinking using his multiple
intelligences theory (Strauss).
We now know that intelligences are not the same as learning styles
(just as well, because we know what that might mean!), but are they really
intelligences in the sense that Gardner claims?
In preparation for this section, we read dozens of articles about multi-
ple intelligences. The best summary of the arguments was provided by
 In Education, You Need to Take Account of Different Types of Intelligence 65

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia.

He thinks that what Gardner called “intelligences” are actually “talents”.
Why are we referring to musical, athletic, and interpersonal skills as intelli-
gences? Gardner was certainly not the first psychologist to point out that
humans have these abilities. Great intelligence researchers Cyril Burt,
Raymond Cattell, Louis Thurstone discussed many human abilities, including
aesthetic, athletic, musical, and so on. The difference was that they called them
talents or abilities, whereas Gardner has renamed them intelligences.
(Willingham, 2004)
Willingham believes and even Gardner himself has suggested some-
thing similar that the theory would never have received so much atten-
tion if the name “intelligences” had not been used. Willingham argues
that this terminology is not correct. According to him, the term “intelli-
gence” has always referred to the kind of thinking skills that make a child
successful in school. After all, the first intelligence test was devised pre-
cisely to predict the likelihood of this success; if it was important in
school, it was included in the intelligence test.
There are a number of problems with the theory of multiple intelli-
gences. First, according to Lynn Waterhouse in her 2006 article in
Educational Psychologist, at that point in time there were no published stud-
ies that offered evidence of the validity of multiple intelligences. While
proponents of the theory, for example Chen, argue that “a theory is not
necessarily valuable because it is supported by the results of empirical
tests” (p. 22) and that “intelligence is not a tangible object that can be
measured” (p. 22), these arguments do not exempt the theory from the
need for validating empirical data. She continues that Gardner himself
makes it next to impossible to validate the “intangible theorized con-
structs” since measurement requires clearly defined components for the
intelligences, but that Gardner himself stated that he will not define such
components! This is like justifying that paranormal experiences did not
happen in a controlled setting by saying that they did not occur because
the “vibes” in the test situation were not right. Even if all people in a
soccer stadium give “vibes” that gravity does not exist, the beer that I am
holding will still fall to the ground if I let it slip out of my hand.
Another problem posed by Waterhouse is that research has shown that
many of the categories of intelligence that Gardner differentiates correlate
very highly with each another and thus cannot really be considered to be
separate intelligences. Cognitive performance on skills related to ver-
bal linguistic, logical mathematical and visual spatial tasks, as well as
66 Urban Myths about Learning and Education

many memory tasks, have been shown be highly related. In other words,
general intelligence. She concluded:
Enthusiasm for the use of the theory in classroom practice should be tempered
by the awareness that the lack of sound empirical support makes it likely that
its application will have little real power to enhance pupil learning beyond that
stimulated by the initial excitement of something new. (Waterhouse, 2006)
John White, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Education at the
Institute of Education University of London, in discussing his problems
with Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, presents a number of pro-
blems in relation to the theory. First, it is a theory of development. The
theory assumes that what occurs or unfolds in the biological realm is also
found in the mental realm. White posits two problems with this develop-
mentalism, namely:
• In the biological realm it is so that in the seed/initial state, “biological
seeds, plant or animal, have within them the power to unfold into
more complex stages, given appropriate environmental conditions”.
While a newborn human also has certain inborn capacities such as the
power to see and hear things, to desire for food and so forth, these
capacities do not have “within them the power to unfold into more
complex forms”. They may change and become more sophisticated
(whatever that may mean to different people) but they do not unfold
into these. The changes are cultural products into which people are
socialized. They are what makes one person crave a hamburgers and
fries while another craves oysters and foie gras, what makes one per-
son go to a wrestling match and another to an opera. One is not bet-
ter than the other, but the original desires and powers to eat and see
have become sophisticated in different, sociocultural ways.
• The mature state (Gardner’s end-state) is clear in physical contexts. A
fully grown human, worm or plant is one that can grow no further.
While all biological entities continue to change, the changes that
occur are either changes that maintain a steady state or changes
towards the entity’s inevitable deterioration; they are not towards fur-
ther growth as is the case with respect to learning. If we were to apply
Gardner’s ideas to the mind, what we are actually saying is that we all
have mental ceilings in each of Gardner’s intelligences that we can
either maintain (i.e., we will never know any more and we can only
maintain what we have learnt until our point of biological maturity)
or lose (i.e., as our brains inevitably deteriorate).
 In Education, You Need to Take Account of Different Types of Intelligence 67

But his major concern “is not with MI [multiple intelligences] theory for
its own sake but with its present influence in the educational world. If I am
right, the eight or nine intelligences have not been shown to exist. If so, what
are the implications for the school reforms based on the theory? As things are
now, children are being encouraged to see themselves . . . as having innately
given strengths in certain areas. This is part of their self-understanding. But if
the theory is wrong, they may be getting a false picture of themselves”.
In other words, multiple intelligences is more a booster of self-esteem
than a prescription for teaching and learning (Gardner himself warned that he
has proposed a scientific theory that should not be mistaken for a prescription
for schooling). White continues that, in his opinion, there are better ways of
improving self-esteem, “ones based on fact rather than illusion” and that see-
ing one’s intelligence in all of those pigeonholes [our words] “can be just as
limiting to children’s self-perception as IQ theory used to be. In some ways it
is only a pluralistic version of this older determinism”.
The educational supporters of Gardner’s theories assumed that his new
intelligences had roughly the same meaning and so drew the conclusion
that if people have a particular type of intelligence, then the schools
should teach it. This could lead to an interesting discussion about the
proper function of schools, but the truth of the matter is that the theory
actually reverses the original meaning of intelligences. This does not
exempt you from your obligation as a teacher to find out as much as you
can about the different talents of your pupils, so that you can then make
best positive use of these talents. Just remember that they are probably
not intelligences in the sense that Gardner meant.

A Well-Researched Alternative? Guilford’s Structure of

Intellect Model
In 1955, J. P. Guilford an early proponent of the idea that intelligence
is not a unitary concept first presented his structure of intellect model
(Figure 9), which he continued to revise through the years based on
empirical psychometric research. In that model, a person’s intelligence
can be categorized by 180 different components in three different inde-
pendent dimensions or categories:
• six operations: cognition, memory recording, memory retention, diver-
gent production, convergent production, evaluation
• six products: units, classes, relations, systems, transformations, implications
• five contents: visual, auditory, symbolic, semantic, behavioral.
68 Urban Myths about Learning and Education

Figure 9 Guilford’s structure of intellect model. Designed by Pedro De

Bruyckere, based on Guilford, J. P. (1988). Some changes in the structure of
intellect model. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 48, 1 4.

Since the dimensions are independent, there are theoretically 150

different components of intelligence (6 3 6 3 5 5 180).
Sources
Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Guilford, J. P. (1988). Some changes in the structure of intellect model.
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 48, 1 4.
Guilford, J. P., & Hoepfner, R. (1971). The analysis of intelligence. New York:
McGraw-Hill.

:-| We are more inclined to regard multiple intelligences as a kind of

philosophy rather than a proven theory. We refrain from calling it a
myth, but it is a theory that has the potential to become a myth, if taken
too seriously.

REFERENCES
Adey, P. (2012). From fixed IQ to multiple intelligences. In P. Adey, & J. Dillon (Eds.),
Bad education (pp. 199 214). Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Checkley, K. (1997). The first seven . . . and the eighth intelligence: A conversation with
Howard Gardner. Educational Leadership, 55(1), 8 13.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic
Books.
 In Education, You Need to Take Account of Different Types of Intelligence 69

Geake, J. (2008). Neuromythologies in education. Educational Research, 50, 123 133.

Strauss, V. (2013, October 16). Howard Gardner: “Multiple intelligences” are not “learn-
ing styles”. Retrieved March 31, 2014, from ,http://www.washingtonpost.com/
blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/16/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-are-not-
learning-styles/..
Waterhouse, L. (2006). Multiple intelligences, the Mozart effect, and emotional intelli-
gence: A critical review. Educational Psychologist, 41(4), 207 225.
White, J. (2005). Howard Gardner: The myth of multiple intelligences London: Institute of
Education Viewpoint No. 16.
Willingham, D. T. (2004, Summer). Reframing the mind. Education Next. Retrieved May
30, 2012, from ,http://educationnext.org/reframing-the-mind/..