Using MI Theory to Teach Sports

Howard Gardner recently received an inquiry from a ski instructor who is writing a teaching manual for professional ski instructors. They wrote:

You may or may not know this: your work on Multiple Intelligences has been a major contribution in the field of snowsports instruction; instructors everywhere incorporate these concepts in lessons.

In our section of our Teaching Manual on cognitive development, we refer to you and your work. We have 25,000 member instructors in our organization and, as you can imagine, understanding the ways our students process information, problem-solve, and store what they learn from us, is highly valuable—which is why our teaching manual includes your theory.

Dr. Gardner answered some questions which might be of interest to anyone teaching sports.

Why would it be important for snowsports instructors to understand the concept of multiple intelligences in our students?

Presumably individuals who come to you for instruction, want to learn how to ski well, and as non-problematically as possible. But we all have different potentials and different strengths— and these capacities did not evolve just for skiing. "MI" theory delineates eight different “mental computers” that all human beings have, but we differ in the strength of these several computers. The challenge for the ski instructor is to work together with each student to determine which “intelligences” are strong, which ones are less potent, and how to combine these intelligences for a smooth and successful learning experience. Think of it as a kind of mental “toolkit” on which both of you can draw as appropriate—and when one tool is not working effectively, try another, or a different combination.

Not all skiing and snowsports students are necessarily "body- or sport-smart" or "nature-smart". How can snowsports pros use our knowledge of Multiple Intelligences to help our students excel in areas that aren't necessarily areas of strength for them?

I am not “body-smart” but I have good linguistic, logical, and musical skills. If you as a teacher can approach the skiing lessons with these strengths and weaknesses in mind, it should make for a more positive experience AND better learning. Of course, your personal relation to the students (the personal intelligences) and their goals and motivations are important considerations as well.

Do you have any message to snowsports instructors—who are, after all, teachers?

You are skiing teachers, but you are also role models and mentors. So the kind of a person you are and how you interact with others is at least as important as knowing which intelligences to tap and how to tap them. And you may well be remembered more as a human being than as someone who coached students with a particular motion or balance technique.

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences: Support from a Most Unlikely Quarter

The IQ test was created in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It reached a highpoint in the United States around 1920: Psychometricians had taken Alfred Binet’s clinical methods and converted them into a set of test items that could be administered and scored efficiently. The IQ test had shown its usefulness in World War I and its aftermath—used as well in educational and clinical settings. When I give talks on the topic of intelligence, I often show two photos: Binet, the French originator, and Lewis Terman, the Stanford University standardizer.

Terman took the IQ very seriously—clearly he believed that it was the gold standard in psychological measurement. As a dedicated researcher with social goals, he sought to identify the brilliant students in California (more men, to be sure) and then to follow their trajectories throughout lifetime. The results were impressive, many of the individuals did well, but also disappointing—no geniuses emerged and some of the most productive and most notable Californians of the era did not make the cut. There’s an impressive literature on the 1500 or so who were so identified—often dubbed “the Termites.”

In the 1920s, Terman launched a set of volumes called “Genetic Studies of Genius.” I have been most interested in Volume 2, called “Early Mental Traits of 300 Geniuses,” with Catharine Cox as the senior author. Using biographical information and the concepts that undergirded the Stanford-Binet IQ test, Cox sought to determine the IQs of 300 extremely eminent individuals (mostly men) who lived in the 15th-19thcenturies.

 I have two diametrically opposed views of this work. On the one hand, Cox (and research assistants) did virtually super-human research to figure out the IQs of these individuals (and a comparison group.) They read primary sources in several languages, computing reliability scores, and laid out what they had read about and what inferences they had made. For their efforts they get a straight A.

 On the other hand…

The notion that one can compute an individual’s skills and knowledge, as well as areas of lesser competence, from reading biographies written decades, even centuries, after the childhood of these individuals is bizarre. And even if we had records far more detailed and accurate—including scores on IQ tests!—it’s hard to avoid the tendency of the biographers to look for, or even invent, signs of precocity in those who eventually left a mark on history. I consider this endeavor to be fundamentally misguided—at best, a Sisyphean task. If I were the grader, I would say “go back to the drawing boards and come up with a different dissertation.”

Of course, it’s easier to say this a century later—Cox submitted her dissertation on this topic to Professor Terman in 1925.

So why revisit this work, long forgotten except for those who work in this field?

In reviewing the work several decades after I first scanned it, what caught my eye was Cox’ effort to rank order professions in order of inferred IQ.

Here’s her list from lowest to highest IQ: At the bottom are soldiers; next come artists and musicians; then religious leaders and statesmen; and finally at the top of the list, writers, scientists, and—the queens or kings of intellect—the philosophers.

I have always maintained that IQ tests—or their cousins—standardized tests like the SAT or GRE—are a reasonable measure of who will succeed in a standard Western educational setting. In my terms, these tests tap linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence—the intelligences, I often quip, of the law professor. And the more that a person wants to remain in an academic setting, and to be judged by academic standards, the more useful these measures are. As are grades and class standing…

But once one leaves the academy, the IQ test proves far less useful. And here is where the other intelligences become relevant, even necessary.

And so, to go down the list:

• Religious leaders and statesmen need to have high personal intelligences

• Musicians need musical intelligence

• Graphic artists require spatial (and bodily-kinesthetic) intelligence

• Soldiers—especially in the pre-modern era—presumably rely on bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, as well as spatial intelligence.

By the way, you may be wondering which soldiers received sufficient eminence to make Cox and Terman’s roster. While I had heard of nearly all of the philosophers, scientists, writers, musicians and artists, many of the soldiers’ names were unknown to me. But when I did recognize names—like General Sherman of Civil War fame and Admiral Lord Nelson of the Napoleonic Wars—it was clear that such individuals had to do more than stay alive and shoot straight. They were planning large and complex operations and yet they may not have been able to solve verbal analogies or complete numerical sequences. The label should have been “military leaders,” not soldiers!

A thought experiment: If we could actually have observed Mozart, or Leonardo, or Shakespeare in their youth—or for that matter, Virginia Woolf, Martha Graham or Eleanor Roosevelt, three women whom I have studied, would they have stood out in terms of IQ? Or would their intelligences have manifested in other ways.

Two cheers for Catharine Cox, who clearly would have done well on her professor’s test. But I wonder how she would have responded to this blog post. Would it have seemed “folly” to her, as it does to celebrants of the IQ—or would it have caused her to rethink her data, methods and argument? I suspect that the answer would not depend on her intelligences, however defined, but on her personality, and particularly her openness to other perspectives.

 Photo by K. Mitch Hodgeon Unsplash 

How Does Distance Learning Affect Education?

I recently received the following question about distance learning and MI theory.

I am a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Since the pandemic has transformed many educational activities into distance learning, I am doing research about Multiple Intelligences (MI) in distance learning based on your MI theory. I have been wondering if distance learning would strengthen, weaken, or make a twist regarding MI. I am starting with musical and logical-mathematical intelligences.
Could you please offer some suggestions or related materials that I can use to guide my research?
Thank you

This is a good question. It's not really about MI per se, but rather about how distance learning affects education altogether. We are fortunate to live in a time when one can send all kinds of messages in various media over long distances—this would not have been possible even thirty years ago. What we don’t know is how much of learning, particularly for young children, depends on a more personal contact with elders and with peers. I suspect that for many young children, it will be difficult to sit in front of a computer or tablet and focus for significant periods of time. This would not be very difficult for most doctoral students!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The Intelligences of Making Music: A Personal Exploration

From an early age, music has been very important in my life. After picking out tunes on a neighbor’s piano, I began to study piano formally when I was barely seven years old; and by the time that I was 12, I was already quite accomplished. At that point, I had to decide whether to work much more diligently (travel for hours to take lessons, practice each day for 3 hours). I decided I did not want to to pursue piano, especially with that much dedication, and I have never regretted that decision. (I would not have liked the life of a professional pianist). Throughout adolescence and into my early adult years, I played the piano quite regularly; also, to make extra money, I offered piano lessons to a few persons.

Then, adulthood intervened. While I still listened regularly to music—mostly classical, but also jazz and “show tunes,” and played the piano when I had some spare moments—I did not practice pieces that I had once mastered, nor did I learn many new ones.  I was, so to speak, “on hold” for half a century.

Then, about seven years ago, when I turned 70, I returned to more regular practice of the piano—a half hour to an hour each day that I was at home. I played pieces that I had once studied, but also tried to learn new ones. This “change of mind, ear, and hand” occurred for a number of reasons:

1. As I was moving toward retirement, I had fewer obligations and more time to play and even to practice.

2. A friend  of mine, a much better pianist, lost the use of one of his arms, and could not play any  longer. I said to myself, “I had better play while I still can.”

3. I read a book by Alan Rusbridger, a well known journalist, in which he chronicled his efforts to master a difficult Chopin ballade. “Play it Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible” served as an unlikely but effective spur.

I’m pleased that I am playing the piano again. I enjoy the respite each day. Especially during the time of COVID-19 and political turmoil in the US and in the rest of the world, I can escape to a different zone of thoughts and feelings. I don’t play well, but at least I am not getting worse.  My wife, family, friends, and neighbors (in our apartment building) don’t seem to mind—and that’s a relief. A lot of time is spent replaying pieces I once knew, and they are easier to play—my fingers remember them, even when I don’t. But I also tackle new pieces, unless they are clearly too difficult. I don’t try to master any of the pieces—I opt for quantity rather than quality. I could easily write about my current and aspiring repertoire, but that’s for another occasion.

So what, if any, are the links to the several intelligences?

Clearly, any involvement with music involves various facets of musical intelligence. I am lucky to have been born with a reasonable amount of musical intelligence. (As a child I had perfect pitch, I began by teaching myself how to play, and I quickly mastered the easier repertoire.) I also played the accordion quite fluently (still have my squeeze box), performed on the organ at my temple, and also learned the basics of flute playing in high school band class.

But like any complex human activity, serious piano playing involves a medley and melding of intelligences. On my analysis, here’s the involvement—or perhaps I should say, “hypothesized involvement,” of several other intelligences:

• Bodily kinesthetic: I am not at all athletic and never was. (For a possible explanation, see the opening chapters of my memoir, A Synthesizing Mind.) But I have considerable digital dexterity, which I draw on for hours each day at the keyboards at both computer and piano. And as arthritis sets in, I worry about when these two forms of finger exercise will be increasingly challenged.

• Linguistic: At the very least, one needs linguistic intelligence to read instructions as well as other aspects of musical symbolization, such as performance instructions. In playing program music or in accompanying singing, the words and phrases matter. And I read a good deal about musical history, biography, and performance—and talk about these facets with friends who are involved with music

• Spatial: In a literal sense, piano playing involves little mastery of space—to be sure, one does not want to fall off the bench or get otherwise disoriented.  But many analysts, including me,  conceptualize musical compositions in spatial terms—as it were, one is navigating a complex space, with themes emerging, switching register, returning in various forms at various points in the aural space. We navigate compositions, just as we navigate neighborhoods or natural spaces. One might consider this a metaphoric use of space. (I should add that, unlike a majority of musicians, I have never thought of compositions as involving actual stories—such as the adventures of people or animals—my engagement is at a more abstract level).

• The personal intelligences: If one performs with others, or for others, one is certainly dealing with the human dimensions—what I’ve termed interpersonal intelligence. (In the times I have played with others, I have keenly felt the need for skills of empathy and communication.) And even if, like me at the piano, you are basically free of an audience, you yourself are an audience—and one automatically grades oneself on the performance of the day, compared to others by you or by other performers. (These are dimensions of intra-personal intelligence.) Also, as one gets to know specific composers, there is also a conversation with the creators of music—though whether that conversation is completely one-sided is a philosophical puzzle.

So much for the original list of the seven intelligences, as laid out in Frames of Mind, almost 40 years old.   Since then I have speculated about three additional other intelligences, each of which merits brief mention:

• Naturalist: I defined this as the capacity to make consequential distinctions in the world of nature—among plants, animals etcetera—and/or to draw on these computational capacities in the man-made world—as one scans, discriminates among, and purchases products. Not only do composers often try to riff off of living beings or elements of nature—but the genres of music are a metaphoric extension of the natural world (the seasons, time of day or night, passage of time). As mentioned, I don’t think of compositions as entailing narratives, but I do group compositions in terms of more abstract concepts—what philosopher Susanne Langer labelled “the forms of feeling” which resemble “natural kinds”.

• Pedagogical: One can be an outstanding musician without being able to teach music to others. And some musicians stand out as teachers, rather than as performers. I’ve taught piano—it is not easy, and I was not a very good instructor. But as with teaching psychology, one can get better—pedagogical intelligence is teachable, learnable.

• Existential: Not disposed to insert a religious dimension into the world of multiple intelligences, I have used this term to denote an interest in “big, philosophically-nuanced questions”—ones having to do with life, death, love, joy, anguish. Works of music (instrumental as well as vocal) differ enormously with respect to whether they deal with such issues. Similarly, those involved in music differ enormously in the extent to which that involvement is simply fun enjoyment (advertising jingles, Musak for the dental office), as opposed to wrestling with the largest puzzles and deepest emotions of life (Wagner, Mahler). As someone of a German background, also most deeply involved with German composers, music clearly has an existential dimension for me. And this “beyond the mundane” aspiration may be true especially about classical music and religious music.

So, that’s my checklist for MI and music. I also have reflections on how these have changed over the span of my life (seven decades at the keyboard), but I’ll save those for another day.

© Howard Gardner 2020

The Costs of Meritocracy: Two Destructive Forms of Being “Smart”

By Howard Gardner (with comment by Michael Sandel)

Michael Sandel, highly esteemed political philosopher at Harvard, has written The Tyranny of Meritocracy—a powerful indictment of contemporary society—especially the versions in the United States and England. In this provocative book, Sandel reflects at length about the importance nowadays of being “smart.” As one who has spent four decades critiquing the use of the word “intelligent” I paid careful attention to Sandel’s words and his case.

Coined in the middle 1950s by British social analyst Michael Young, “meritocracy” denotes a state of affairs: a once aristocratic, inherited society is taken over by individuals presumed to be more talented and more appropriate leaders for the various sectors of the sector. At first blush, this transfer of power and authority sounds good and right—we should be led and inspired by people of ability (think: House of Commons), rather than by people who inherit their wealth, title, and position (think: House of Lords). Even though Young wrote in an ironic spirit—do we really want the students with the highest grades in school to be entrusted with decision about war, peace, trade, health, and the like—the concept of meritocracy has come to be used positively. Indeed, both Presidents Clinton and Obama spoke explicitly and continuously about the importance of a society in which merit is awarded…and awarded again.

Very important for these and other contemporary leaders is “being smart.” In these days of Google counts, we no longer have to wave our hands about such an assertion. President Obama talked explicitly about “smart” over and over again—in his own words, smart policy,  smart foreign policy, smart regulations, smart growth, smart spending cuts, smart grids, and smart technologies. Overall, he used the adjective “smart” in connection with politics and programs more than 900 times! So, too, did his meritocratically-disposed predecessor, Bill Clinton. 

In fact, even Donald Trump, in so many ways different from these Democrats, insists over and over again that he is smart, “very smart”; his cabinet has the highest possible IQ: his uncle was a professor at MIT; he brags about his family’s matriculation at the Wharton School; Joe Biden is “slow”; indeed, in the debate on September 29 of this year, he pounced on Biden’s use of the word “smart” and denigrated his opponent’s intellect and school grades.  

The exuberance about intellect transcends party lines and epochs—indeed, Sandel might claim, there is not even a counter-story. No one explicitly calls for the return of a hereditary aristocracy or even of inherited wealth and positions...though Trump does profess to love “the poorly educated.”

Sandel takes his critique very far. As his title suggests, a celebration of—or even a reluctant surrender to—meritocracy has proved to be disastrous for the contemporary world. On his account: individuals who do well in school and on standardized tests get to attend elite, selective colleges; secure well-paying jobs with concomitant “perks”;  and pass on these social benefits to their children. The statistics are overwhelming, irrefutable, chilling. And even those meritocrats who acknowledge that they may not be wholly responsible for their own success cannot help looking down on those who have not done as well in the Darwinian struggle for worldly success.  

More seriously and more destructively—on Sandel’s account—those who have not attended or failed to graduate from college, and may not even have a steady “respectable” job, feel frowned upon, ignored, or deemed to be “deplorables” mired in “fly-over country.” Ultimately, this state of affairs leads to a society at war with itself, and, quite possibly, the end to democracy and the American (or another national) dream. 

Sandel proposes two kinds of solution: 1) technological—for example,  changing radically the way that one selects among applicants for admission to elite colleges; 2) communal and even spiritual—considering all citizens as equally worthy of respect and conveying that respect in every possible way.

Sandel’s impressive (but also depressing) account stimulates two lines of thought—both connected to my own decades-long reflection on intelligence. As most readers of this blog will know, I took the lead in challenging the notion of a single intelligence, as measured by an IQ or SAT test, and in calling instead for a recognition of different kinds of intelligence, and perhaps as well, an honoring of these different kinds of minds. While notions like “social” or “emotional” intelligence have entered into public discourse, they do not emerge in Sandel’s analysis.

That’s OK by me. But to nuance Sandel’s analysis, I’d suggest that the kinds of intelligence or intelligences honored in 2020 are quite different from those that were valued in earlier epochs. As just one example: 150 years ago, admission to selective colleges required mastery of ancient languages—so-called linguistic intelligence. Nowadays, no one cares about languages (let alone classical ones), but coding and computing intelligences (logical-mathematical intelligence) is at a premium. And as machines get “smarter,” we may well be selecting for yet different kinds of intelligence—ones that are not relevant to machines—such as musical, bodily, or personal intelligences. The word “smart” may not change—but the knowledge and skills to which it refers can and does change radically. And indeed, some of our most successful entrepreneurs—see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—never even completed college because their temperament and ambitions were misaligned to the agenda of college. Ultimately, of course, they received their share of honorary degrees. Even Donald Trump, who apparently had someone else take his SATs and refuses to reveal his college grades, clearly has “media” intelligence.

So much for smartness—where, as I say, Sandel’s argument poses no problem for me. But I have considerable unease with his overall recommendation—that meritocracy should be replaced by conferring dignity on all human beings. As I read Sandel, all human beings are worthy of dignity or respect (I prefer the latter term), independent of who they are, how they behave, how they think about the world. This may sound reasonable at first blush, but it’s not the way that I conceive the issue.

My view: As they grow—indeed, as we grow—individuals should be expected to behave with respect towards others, both those known to them and those who are strangers. And when faced with challenging issues or ideas, all human beings should attempt to deal with them as sensitively and sensibly as possible. Millionaires or even billionaires should not be treated with respect because of the money that they have inherited or amassed; rather, they need to earn that status by how they behave, and to be deprived of that status when they misbehave. By the same token, the plumber or electrician or waiter—three examples frequently used by Sandel and other philosophically oriented analysts—are entitled to as much respect and dignity as the rich person, but not just by dint of their vocation...but rather in light of how they behave toward others, normally, day in and day out.

Of course, how we behave toward others is not something that we are born with. Rather it’s what we garner from family, neighbors, friends, lessons in school and in religious settings, from what we read and view in schools, in movie houses, and nowadays, especially, online. And here is where my intuitions may differ from those of Michael Sandel. I don’t think that good, moral, respectful behavior is any more or any less likely from those who win the meritocratic laurels than from those who for whatever reason do not seek or display those laurels.  

In neither case is one’s deportment toward others a function of intelligence—however it’s defined and/or measured. As I have often argued, an intelligence can be used positively or destructively. Both Goethe and Goebbels had high linguistic intelligence in German; Goethe wrote estimable poetry, Goebbels fomented hatred. Both Mandela and Milosevic had plenty of interpersonal intelligence—Mandela brought together long hostile parts of the South African population, Milosevic fomented ethnic cleansing.

Whether smart or not smart in one or another way (whatever one’s array of intelligences), whether a winner or a loser in a particular meritocratic sweepstakes (whether a CEO or a blue collar worker) is independent of whether one is worthy of respect or dignity. One develops those assets in the course of life—it’s never too early but it may never be too late either. And a society in which individuals respect one another for how they relate to others is the one in which I would like to live.

© Howard Gardner 2020

Comment by michael sandel:

Howard, I think there is some confusion here. I do believe that all human beings are worthy of dignity or respect, independent of who they are and how they behave. This is the basic Kantian idea underlying respect for human rights. It has nothing to do with intelligence, whether of one kind or many kinds. Even a war criminal such as Milosevic, for example, is worthy of respect in this Kantian sense. Though he deserves moral condemnation and punishment for his crimes, it would be wrong to torture him. I doubt we disagree about this. (You’ll tell me if I’m wrong.)

But Kantian respect for persons as persons, or human dignity as such, is not my alternative to meritocracy. By emphasizing the dignity of work, I am proposing that we broaden our understanding of what counts as contributing to the common good beyond the value the labor market assigns to our contributions. This is why I emphasize “contributive justice,” by which I mean conferring appropriate social recognition and esteem on valuable contributions that the market may not properly recognize (such as care work, for example, or the work now being performed “essential workers” during the pandemic).

You rightly draw our attention to yet a third basis of social regard or esteem, having to do with how people behave, whether they treat others with respect, and so on. So we might distinguish three different grounds of respect:

1.  Kantian respect for human dignity, which requires that we respect everyone’s human rights, regardless of what work they do or how well they behave;

2. Respect for the dignity of work, which requires that we accord social recognition to those who make valuable contributions to the common good (typically but not only through work; unpaid community service should certainly count).

3. Respect or admiration for those who behave morally, which includes treating others with respect but also includes other praise-worthy behavior.

In the book, my primary alternative to meritocracy is #2. But this is not inconsistent with affirming #1 and #3. I certainly do not think “that good, moral, respectful behavior” is more likely “from those who win the meritocratic laurels than from those who for whatever reason do not seek or display those laurels.” So this is not a point of disagreement between us. 

My Response:

Thanks, Michael, for this very thoughtful and helpful clarification. I think we are broadly in agreement. I’m not confident that we can simply instruct or encourage individuals to honor all work equally—though it’s been a goal of social reformers for centuries. I have slightly more confidence that we can instruct or encourage individuals to distinguish between highly-paid work, on the one hand, and “good work”—work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical, on the other. But I’d be pleased to encourage both approaches.

Photo by Morgan Housel on Unsplash