Howard Gardner's Debunked Theory of Multiple Intelligences Won't Die
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why the multiple intelligences theory persists in education despite being thoroughly debunked by cognitive science.
Key Takeaways
- The theory has been debunked - Cognitive scientists have repeatedly shown that multiple intelligences lacks scientific support
- It persists because it feels good - The idea that every child is 'smart in their own way' is emotionally appealing even when scientifically unfounded
- It leads to bad instruction - Designing lessons around supposed intelligences wastes time and doesn't improve learning
Transcript
okay i think this is finally making sense to me multiple intelligences and critical thinking these are both neuro myths that have been around for a long time the idea that critical thinking is this kind of generalized skill that we can teach students and that there are these 21st century skills that if we just teach these skills we won't need to actually teach content that idea seems to be everywhere and another idea that has never really died despite the lack of scientific evidence for it is howard gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and there's a video making the rounds this week of Howard Gardner basically doubling down on his theory while admitting that there is no scientific evidence for it and how he thought future brain studies would vindicate this perspective when he came up with it in the 80s, like how that has just failed to happen and yet he's not giving up on it.
I think we have got to put the nail in the coffin of multiple intelligences theory and learning styles and the idea of general critical thinking so that we can actually teach effectively and how we have to actually teach effectively is in domain specific ways and it finally occurred to me this week why we get so mixed up about this you look at any expert and they seem to be really good at something and i've seen some some experts who study cognitive psychology explain that when you look at lots of different experts in different fields it's easy to think they're all doing the same thing that we could just teach students to think like experts and to use critical thinking and to be uh curious and to develop 21st century skills when what's really happening is very different based on the domain right when you are an expert archaeologist or an expert chess player or an extra expert tuba player like you're doing very different things to exercise that expertise because it is domain specific So there is no kind of generalized thing that we can teach that will help students just be good at everything, right?
You have to actually learn each of those things independently.
And Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences plays into that by giving us the idea that people are intelligent in different ways that are innate and that are based in the brain, right?
Like some people are more visual or spatial or kinesthetic or auditory or linguistic.
And that idea has not held up, right?
Like that idea is not true.
The brain does not work that way.
and yet we see people good at different things and it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense well why it makes sense to us is because they are developing domain specific knowledge it's not that their brain is different it's that they have put different knowledge into their brain through practice through effort through learning and that is why we see differences in expertise that's why different people can think critically in different fields and yet there's no such general thing as critical thinking that is a teachable skill Different people can be good at different things, whether that is athletics or writing or languages or music, and yet there's no such thing as multiple intelligences.
Does that make sense?
Let me know what you think.