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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:
Contents
Page Preface
Introduction
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