ABSTRACT
Of all the ideas to come out of a university and into classrooms over the last 30 years, surely the one that has produced the most debate, the most controversy, the greatest amount of printed material and spoken words has to be the theory of Multiple Intelligences as put forward by Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1983. And rightly so in my book (which this is). Although there are many detractors from his theory, some of whom I
am convinced are driven more by academic jealousy over Gardner’s ‘academic rock star’ status than anything else, I have seen nothing to rival the theory’s ability to open up learning to huge numbers of otherwise disenfranchised people, people for whom the narrow IQ view of intelligence would otherwise have consigned them to a life of ignorant thick-ness! When it comes to democratizing learning – the ‘dumbing up’ I mentioned in chapter 10 – the effective understanding and use of MI theory has no equal. One of the ways of muddying the waters overMI is in the actual definition
of both what is intelligence and also what is an intelligence? Gardner admits that ‘this is not as simple a matter as I’d like it to be’, adding that proponents of his MI theory ‘have used the term “intelligence” in a variety of ways and I myself have added to the confusion’. In his 1993 book Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice he tries to clarify matters and defines an intelligence as what he calls ‘a biophysical potential’, something he goes on to describe as follows:
All members of the species have the potential to exercise a set of intellectual faculties of which the species is capable.
