Chapter 10 - Do it in style

Home | TLR Contents | Search | Discussion | Events | Own the Book | FREE New Edition Preview | Contact us

Do it in style	343

was obviously a great painter, William Shakespeare a phenomenal writer, Joe Louis and Babe Ruth great sportsmen, Enrico Caruso a brilliant tenor, Anna Pavlova an outstanding ballet dancer and Katharine Hepburn a fine actress.
  Every person reading this page has a different lifestyle and a different workstyle. Successful businesses depend on their ability to cater to those different lifestyles. And human-resource consultants spend their lives matching workstyle talents to jobs.
  Yet many of our schools operate as if each person is identical. Even worse: most operate with an evaluation or testing system that rewards only a limited number of abilities. And those rewards early in life often separate the allegedly gifted and intelligent from those who are claimed to be less intelligent and underachievers.
  Possibly the worst educational innovation of this century was the so-called intelligence test. Two French psychologists, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, developed the first modern tests in 1905. Two American psychologists, Lewis M. Terman and Maud A. Merrill, both of Stanford University, later adapted the French work into what became known as the Stanford-Binet tests.
  These did a good job of testing certain abilities. But they didn't test all abilities. And, worse, they gave rise to the concept that intelligence is fixed at birth. Intelligence is not fixed.
  Better still: we each have access to many different "intelligences" or intelligence traits.
  And if the current authors had to choose any one step needed to transform the world's high-school systems in particular it would be this: find out each student's combination of learning styles and talents - and cater to it; and at the same time encourage the well-rounded development of all potential abilities.
  The major fault with so-called I.Q., or intelligent quotient, tests is that they confuse logic with overall intelligence - when logic, as we've seen, is only one form of thinking skill. Some tests also confuse linguistic ability with overall ability.
  In recent years Harvard Professor of Education Howard Gardner has been one of many who have made pioneer breakthroughs in shattering the "fixed I.Q." myth. For more than 15 years Gardner has used prolific research to prove that each person has at least seven different "intelligence centers", probably more. As we've touched on, he's defined:

First	Prev	Top	Next	Last

Contents Page   Preface    Introduction