BW: Even if you haven’t pressed for it, do you have an ideal educational institution in your head?
HG: One, I’ve never been deluded enough to think I could run a school. Two, multiple intelligences cannot be the key idea of a school. The key idea of a school has to be what you want an educated person to be. Only after you state your educational goal can we talk about how multiple intelligences might help you achieve it. If your goal is to have high standardized test scores, that’s very different from wanting people who can work together effectively in a community. The goal has to come first. So when people say, I have an M.I. school, I smile and say, that’s nice, but what I’m really interested in is your educational goal, and what are you trying to achieve with your population.
All that said, after 35 years I can boil down the two basic educational implications of M.I. theory which I would pursue: individuate and pluralize. Individuate means whenever possible try to teach individuals in ways they can learn, and comfortably show what they’ve learned. One group that’s always had individual education was the wealthy, because they hired tutors. We can now individuate for any person who has access to a computer. The possibility of individuating has become greater in the past 30 years than in all of human history.
Pluralize is the other side of the coin. It means anything that’s worth teaching can be taught in a number of different ways. Math, physics, music, astronomy, psychology — there’s nothing of any importance which can only be taught one way. If you teach pluralistically, two wonderful things happen: One, you reach more kids, because some learn better bodily, some artistically, some learn through groups, etc. Two, it shows you really understand something. Because when you really understand something, you can think about it in lots of ways. You can talk, joke, write, make a diagram, etcetera. So anyone who takes M.I. very seriously — I’ve never said this before — needs to figure out what his or her education goals are, and how to achieve those goals through individuation and pluralization.
What I don’t say is that you need to learn the Articles of Confederation or all the English kings, because now anyone who has the slightest amount of disposable income can own a personal digital assistant which can call up that information. So it’s a total waste of time to memorize that stuff. Learning how to learn and acquiring a desire to keep learning is what schools ought to be about.
BW: But is teaching harder if education is pluralized? Aren’t you requiring teachers to be very flexible and have skill in several different intelligences?
HG: Well, I put it the other way around: Anybody who can only teach something one way has a flimsy control of the subject matter. I’d say we are trying to make education teacher-proof. The best educational systems in the world are ones in which teachers are highly professional, and that means being flexible in how you present material. If the kid can’t learn in one way, you don’t just repeat yourself or say, “You’re stupid.”
BW: To promote reform, do you hope the schools that adopt M.I. programs demonstrate their efficacy with results that are strong enough to catch on?
That’s my own bias. I’m for the magnetic boutique. That’s a place that is so strong and good that when people see it, they’re stunned but say, “We can do that, too, if you help us.” The best example I have is a place I’ve been working with for 40 years, a place in Italy called Reggio Emilia — they have fantastic schools for young kids there. They have no interest in proselytizing, yet people from all over the world make pilgrimages. It’s the best-known early-childhood education program in the world.
It’s the opposite of scaling up. Scaling up is when somebody does something impressive, and regulation gets passed that everybody has to do the same thing. I don’t think it ever works. The magnetic boutique is when you do something very special very well, and people hear about it, are inspired, and want to try to do it themselves.
BW: You isolated seven intelligences: linguistic, logical, mathematical, spatial, music, body/kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. Fifteen years later, you added a natural intelligence. Are there others under consideration?
I considered existential intelligence — the ability to ask the big questions. But I still cling to the idea that intelligence is most persuasive when you can find parts of the nervous system that are dedicated to that kind of thing.
BW: What about moral intelligence?
HG: I don’t think that any intelligence is moral or amoral. Intelligences are computational capacities, and it’s how you use those capacities that is what we call moral or ethical. Both Nelson Mandela and Slobodan Milošević have a lot of interpersonal intelligence: They know how to move people. Milošević used it to ferment hatred and commit ethnic cleansing; Mandela brought a split country together. The intelligences were similar, but the uses were very different. So intelligences are not moral or immoral, it’s the uses to which they’re put. This flies in the face of what a lot of people in my field now talk about — the moral instinct, and so on.
BW: Which is the view that morality has developed through evolution.
HG: That’s right. Of course there’s something to that; that’s why I introduced the distinction between neighborly morality and the ethics of roles. There’s no doubt that, as a species, we evolved to know the people in our neighborhood, and if we cheated them too much we were likely to be cheated, so a rough reciprocity is our primate legacy. But in any complex society, there are decisions we have to make in which our neighborly instincts are no help at all, which are what I call the ethics of work and the ethics of citizenship. These are completely cultural things: to know what a journalist or citizen should or shouldn’t do. What we learned as primates is not going to be any help there.
BW: So what are the implications of neighborly morality and the ethics of roles in terms of creating a more ethical society?
HG: Well, in the past 25 years I’ve been working with colleagues on what I call the “Good Work Project” [editors’s note: now called The Good Project]. It was a time in the United States where people were saying, “Government is bad, regulation is bad, markets are good, everything is best left to supply-and-demand.” Now, I’m a beneficiary of markets and so are my colleagues, but we are absolutely convinced that you cannot run a society only on a market basis. You cannot run a society where the only people that can get medical care, education, and legal representation are those who can afford it. We recently saw that everything will go off a cliff if you leave it up to market forces. So the Good Work Project is an empirical project — we interviewed over 1,200 people in nine different professions over a 10-year period, trying to understand what good work is, and how to achieve it. And recently my own group has been looking at good citizenship.
Good Work is the combination of Three E’s: “Excellence,” “Engagement,” and “Ethics.” Work qualifies as good if it is technically excellent, if it’s personally engaging and meaningful, and if it’s carried out in an ethical and responsible way. A person is a good citizen to the extent that, one, he’s informed and knows the laws; two, cares about them; and three, doesn’t just act in his own self-interest. Here, again, is where the market stuff is flawed. According to economic textbooks, people working in their own self-interest produces a viable society. But if you go back and read Adam Smith, you’ll find that isn’t what he thought at all. He presumed that people would be civic-minded, which doesn’t have anything to do with self-interest in any narrow sense.
So for 10 years we studied good work and good citizenship, and for five years my colleagues and I traveled the world and trying to teach young people — and some who aren’t so young — to become good workers and good citizens. We launched the Good Work tool kit website [editors’s note: now at The Good Project]. Go to it, and you can see where we’re trying to work with the rest of the world on these big issues.
The article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
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- The New Age of Enlightenment: An Interview With Steven Pinker
- On The Threshold: An Interview with Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg
- You Are Your Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
