Class In Session: Individuation and Pluralization with Dr. Howard Gardner

This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.

Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,

educated educators talking education.

Yes, it is Busted Pencils fully-ledded education talk,

educated educators talking education, classes in session,

and man, Johnny and Jess classes truly in session today,

because we have got a guest that for a lot of us who have

been in education, our acquaintances or our connections

to our guests have come through in so many different ways

and so many different uses that we were able to think

about this.

Johnny and Jess, I know typically I check in with you guys

how you're doing and things like that.

Give me the thumbs up, I know you're doing great,

because I got a guest like this has a long introduction,

so I got to have some time.

He's a renowned psychologist and educator

whose theory of multiple intelligences revolutionized

how we understand human potential.

He's the author of Frames of Mind, a groundbreaking book

that inspired new approaches to teaching and learning

in schools, curricula, and homes around the world.

He is also the author of a synthesizing mind

where he reflects on his intellectual journey

and the critical importance of developing the ability

to connect ideas across disciplines.

He's also got two new volumes coming up.

We'll let him promote that.

Welcome to Busted Pencils, Dr. Howard Gardner.

Dr. Gardner, how are you?

Thank you, thanks for that nice introduction.

And yes, as people who can see me will know

and maybe people can hear me, I'm not young anymore.

And so as I entered my ninth decade,

I put out two collections of my writings.

One is called the Essential Howard Gardner on Mind

and the other is called the Essential Howard Gardner

on Education.

And since, as you said, my theory of multiple intelligences

is what's best known.

If you're particularly interested

in the educational implications,

Essential Gardner on Education is the one to look at.

If you're more interested in how it relates

to psychology and to other disciplines,

to creativity, leadership, good work,

then the Essential Howard Gardner on Mind is the one.

But if you want to be really smart,

you should get both of them.

Get them both.

And we'll make sure to, listening in the podcast,

we'll have links so that you're able to get those books.

And again, theory of multiple intelligences,

this is where I think most people

Howard are going to say, oh, oh, yeah.

Yeah, I definitely heard of that.

I was wondering though, too, if, again,

we have you here, we have the opportunity,

just a little bit of going back

and kind of help us grasp,

and the listener to understand multiple intelligences.

And I'll kind of phrase it this way,

as a child in the early 70s,

I got, quote, called for the potential

that I might be gifted.

And at that time, the standardized number two bubble test

came back and said, oh, no, no, no, no, sorry Tim,

wrong person, you're definitely not gifted.

And thinking about that and wondering,

it's like, we've come a long way

saying in fact, even that word gifted,

and I'm phrasing that, however,

because I think a lot of listeners would be like,

oh, we're talking about gifted education.

But for me, when the multiple intelligence came forward,

it was really that opportunity to say, hey, guess what?

There are lots of ways to be gifted.

And I was wondering if you can kind of give us

a kind of retro, where did this come from?

I mean, what prompted you to even synthesize this idea?

Sure, as a young psychologist,

I was very interested in the arts,

because I have a background in the arts,

and I was kind of intrigued

that the psychologists never looked at the arts.

They looked mostly at the sciences

or more standard parts of the academics,

world, and I said, this is a real deficit.

Then my colleagues and I were lucky enough

to get a huge grant to study what was known

about the human mind toward the end of the 20th century.

And I was able to canvas many literatures

to interview many people, to travel to many parts of the world.

And I realized that the Western notion of smart

is much too limited.

And because I've been studying the brain,

I realized that each part of the brain,

so to speak, processes is a different kind of information.

If I'd written a book called Seven Talents

or Seven Gifts, you wouldn't be talking to me today.

But I decided to call it the theory of multiple intelligences

and just right away mobilized the entire psychology

profession to be against me,

because they have such a vested interest in the IQ test,

which is a good way to predict

if you have 15 minutes who's gonna do better

in second grade or worse.

But once you start to think about all the abilities

we need in the world to succeed in various ways,

to deal with other people, to be able to use our bodies well,

to be able to find our way around space,

to be able to master various kinds of trades and arts

and so on, the notion of a single intelligence

is really very flawed.

So when I published a book called Frames of Mind,

the Theory of Multiple Intelligence,

I was shocked by how quickly educators said,

you know, we've already known this,

but nobody has given us a framework

in which to describe what it is that we see in young children.

Some are very good with language,

some are very good with mathematics,

some are very good with music,

some are very good with spatial orientation,

some are very good with intricate uses of their bodies,

some really understand other people well,

some don't understand other people,

but understand themselves well.

Others are very good at making distinctions

in nature between one animal and another, one plant and other.

Gardener, this guy has written 400 pages with thousands

of footnotes to really legitimize each of these

as forms of intelligence.

And it has really had huge effects in the world of education,

initially in this country,

then more in Latin America and East Asia.

Now 40 years later,

what they call the Belt and Road countries,

places like Thailand, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan,

people are learning about the theory.

And what I try to do is to be helpful,

but not to over-promise because of course,

even if you believe there are lots of different intelligences,

that doesn't tell you how to change your school.

And I'm sure we will talk about that.

Yeah, Johnny.

Well, yeah, this is a great conversation,

especially for our listeners.

You know, we're always talking how we're about teaching

about most of us are teachers.

Tim and I both teach teachers.

And so as you know,

your work has had a tremendous impact and influence

on learning to be a teacher.

And you know, so I'm just thinking for our listeners,

as we have you here

and you just laid out multiple intelligences

and so on how it's come to be and what it is,

but talk to us a little bit about from your perspective,

how it helps us be better teachers.

After looking at many, many different experiments

with multiple intelligences all around the world,

I've come up with two terms which I think are helpful.

One is individuation and the other is polarization.

Individualization is find out as much about each learner

as you can and try to present materials

in ways that the learner can enter into them,

begin to grapple with them, understand them,

ask questions and so on.

Now, if you say, well, I've got 30 kids in a class,

50 kids in a class I can't individuate,

it's obviously more difficult

passing knowledge from one grade to the other

from one teach to the other is helpful.

But what has revolutionized, of course,

is new kinds of technology

because there's no reason why we can't teach geometry

in 20 different ways online

and not with artificial intelligence.

We could create a new one just for Johnny or just for Tim

just for Jess.

So individuation is much, much more possible

in the 21st century than it was

except when Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle,

that was individuation,

but Macedonia had a lot of material to work with

in individuation.

Pluralization is, I think, undervalued.

We, if we try to teach everything in the world,

we would clearly fail.

So I think in every topic

and every interdisciplinary area,

we have to say, what's the most important ideas?

If it's biology, what's evolution about?

What's quantum mechanics about?

What's gravity about?

But there's no reason

that you have to teach us in just one way.

And if I said to you, Tim,

all right, I know we're talking about gravity,

but can you explain it to me another way?

Can you show it to me?

Can you enact it?

Can we take two things and drop them from my high?

If you can only teach it in one way,

you're not a good teacher.

So it's the combination of knowing as much about

the child as possible so you can teach him or her

in a way that makes sense to that child.

But it's the same understanding your topic,

your concept, deeply enough.

So if one way of presenting it

doesn't work another way would be.

And I think people who understand that aspect

of multiple intelligences will be better teachers.

Of course, teachers should talk to one another.

I taught for, I actually was teaching piano

when I was a kid.

I taught K through two when I was in graduate school.

Of course, I've taught college and graduate students ever since.

And the more you teach and find something doesn't work,

the more important is to talk to colleagues,

try something new out and see whether that works better.

It doesn't always work better,

but at least it helps you understand it better.

And that puts you in a better position

when kids says, well, I got this far

when we were doing the quadratic equation,

but I really got stuck here.

Can you help me?

You don't just say, well, if you didn't get it this way,

I can't help you.

That's awesome.

And we always talk about it with our teachers.

The teachers learn the most when we're talking to each other

about our students and how they learn differently

in the ways that we can differentiate.

Or like you're saying, pay attention

to individuation and pluralization.

And I just got to thank you

because your theory of multiple intelligences

helped me as a teacher,

but also helped so many teachers make sense of that.

What might that look like?

How can we begin to think about the different ways

that we might need to explain something?

So we can practice that ahead

so that we have those skills in our pocket

as those teachable moments we call them come up.

So I really want to thank you

and appreciate that explanation

and love this focus on individuation and pluralization.

Yeah.

And if I were to rewrite the book today,

it would clearly take advantage of AI

and all the different kinds of platforms that exist now.

But that's a job for somebody have my age to do,

I can root for them.

You can root for them and how it actually do.

We do quite a bit of talking about AI.

Johnny and I have a little running kind of feud,

although we're getting closer and closer

to being on the pretty close to the same page.

I want to talk a little bit about that,

but I want to ask this question

because you talk about the theory and the implications

and that challenge from the very beginning

to this one way of, quote, knowing or one way of measuring.

And you know, I said, like you said,

towards the end of the 90s,

I remember that push and kind of going forward

and going like, wow, this is great.

We're finally going to acknowledge individuals,

their skills, their unique gifts.

And boy, the pushback on that idea

continues to be a theme,

particularly in American public education

and thinking about no child left behind, race to the top.

All of that to me was kind of going,

we're not going to go with multiple intelligences in ways.

We're not going to go with individuation.

We're not going to go with pluralization.

We've got individuals that we need to measure

because their parents need to know, society needs to know.

And I just wonder how you kind of looking at

the kind of sociopolitical effects of policies

that hit particularly public education in America.

How do you see those kind of trends of what's in and what's out?

Well, I was remarked to my wife

that Margaret Meade, the anthropologist,

said, the American public needs a new play thing

in education every 10 to 15 years.

And it doesn't really matter what it is.

And I think, am I at its day,

looking at the list of the people

who are most contacted now,

I think Angelic Duckworth with grit

and cow dweck with a mental set,

they've sort of followed through

in the multiple intelligences trial.

But my serious answer to your question is,

we can't ignore the signals from the broader society,

but it doesn't tell us how to teach

and it doesn't tell us how to deal with individual kids.

And the more sophisticated the teacher is,

or the school is, or the headmaster is,

or the principal is, the more flexible they'll be

in helping achieve those educational priorities,

which the state or the country states are important.

But as somebody who knows a lot about education around the world,

the best performing schools are in Finland and in Singapore.

There are not two countries that are more different

than one another than Finland and Singapore.

But in each case, they take teaching seriously.

And as long as the students end up performing well,

the teachers are given a lot of latitude.

As we know, alas,

have to teach people who enter

in the classroom in America,

leave after five years,

because there isn't a good progress

from being a rookie,

to being a good amateur, to being a professional,

and then becoming a head teacher,

a phrase which is used in both other societies.

So I think the answer to your question, Tim,

is more of a question about sociology

than it is a question about pedagogy.

And if we had the same respect for teachers

and for education,

that countries as different as Finland and Singapore had,

and actually England is doing better

in the last 10 or 15 years

on the kinds of measures we're talking about,

the Tim's and other international comparisons.

And I think it's because they have a background

of inspectors who come around to schools

and they don't just say, show us your test scores,

they go into classes

and they watch how teachers perform.

So this is, I wish it were an educational

and psychological question,

but it's really a political and sociological question.

Yeah, for sure, Johnny, because right,

I mean, that's, we just had a guest on Ira Sokol,

his new book, Design to Fail,

a history of education in America.

And boy, Ira really kind of lays this out

and says, you know, for all of those individuals

that found schooling challenging,

the reality was is that because the social aspects

as you point out, the political aspects of schooling

were never, at least from Ira's point of view,

designed to encourage entice and develop learners

as much as it was to kind of categorize,

compartmentalize, and sort kids.

And we know that and we see that continued to this day.

What are the, you know, the aims and purposes

of education in any society?

And I'm so happy to hear you again, talk about Finland

and Singapore, because in putting those together like that,

because as you pointed out, very different, very different,

but that the common thread, and this is where I think

our listeners are going to love this,

is treating teachers as those professionals

who have that ability to really jump in

and have a sense where in America, we've said, you know,

people say we have a teacher short,

as I said, no, we have a teacher exodus.

We have a problem with keeping our best teachers, you know,

and if you're one of those great best teachers out there,

608-557-8577, that's the Busted Pencils Mailbag line,

you know, we want to hear from you.

If you have a question too, we'll get it to Howard,

608-557-8577.

So I don't know, it was just me, I guess I kind of went on

a little bit of a ramble there, Howard,

but you know, we just keep pushing this

and again, to recognize that there are places

where people are doing really great work.

And the idea is, what is it that stops, you know,

and we're going to talk more very specifically,

America from replicating things that work other places?

I mean, that's, I think it's going to call for another

another program, but let me say something

which is very serious and will make many people uncomfortable.

Artificial intelligence is going to explode

how education is carried out around the world.

We're in touch with Chinese curricular developers,

they want to put everything in AI.

Now, from a social point of view, we might say,

this is a good thing, that's a, again, that's a topic

for another podcast, but when we have the capacity

to individuate through chat GPT and other large language

instruments as much as possible for every child,

and when, in addition, if one way of teaching doesn't work,

we can, we can just use another way.

This is going to explode.

The way education is done everywhere.

And I borrowed a word from a company,

which we all know meta, not because

I have any particular relationship to meta,

but meta is, it's a Greek word,

which means you have to look at things

from a more distant level.

And I think teachers are going to be spending much less time

worrying about whether somebody knows

all the things that happened in the American Revolution

or the Civil War, because that's instantly available.

And they're going to spend much more time saying,

this is child understand history,

what it means to make a claim, and how to take it seriously.

And when there's a debate about, let's say, reconstruction,

how to evaluate which point of view is better,

or when some people say Einstein explained everything,

and people say no quantum mechanics did it much better,

and then somebody else has super string.

We don't have to go into those details anymore,

but we have to be able to say,

how do we evaluate this whole approach?

And this is where, since you mentioned it,

my book on the synthesizing mind,

which is a personal memoir, is very relevant.

I think that we're going to have to be spending

much less time in the weeds, and much more time

trying to put stuff together.

And there's no reason to think that people in Finland

or Singapore are any better at doing that,

than the United States or England or Brazil.

AI is making a new ball game for education around the world.

And if I were a teacher nowadays,

I'd be somewhat nervous about that.

But in the other hand, if you really believe

in the calling of a teacher,

you can't ignore anything, whether it's the pencil,

or the book, or the typewriter,

or the movie camera, or the smart device,

you have to be able to know how to use them.

And we're not going to talk about social media,

but social media are not going to disappear.

The question for every educator is how

to use them as positively as possible,

and not to have them rune kids either cognitively

or emotionally or in terms of their spirits of that.

And before we wrap up, Howard, though,

I think this connects to what you're talking about.

And I really love this perspective

that you're providing in the synthesizing mind.

But you talk about the good project.

Sure.

Can you get our listener a little intro

to the good project before we depart with you?

Absolutely.

It's great to develop intelligence or intelligences,

but every intelligence can be used benignly or militantly.

Gurbles, the propagandist for Hitler,

used language very well to create hatred.

Gerritte, the German writer, wrote great novels and poetry.

Similarly, you can pick your political figures,

some use the language in ways to bring out the best in people

and some just bring out the destruction.

So we've been working for over 30 years

in what you call the good project.

It's about what does it mean to be a good worker

and a good citizen?

That's not the same thing.

A worker is what do you do for food on the table.

Citizen is what does it mean to be a member of a society

where you have some vote?

And we believe there are three components.

They all begin with letter E, excellence, engagement,

and ethics.

Excellent means whether you're doing teaching

or being a citizen, you've got to know your stuff.

Engagement is you've got to care.

And now it's not so easy to care.

Many of my friends are not listening to the news anymore.

I understand why, but that you're not caring

if you don't know what's going on.

With the good project focuses on ethics,

because we don't need ethics to study the golden rule.

Everybody knows that you should mistreat people

because you'll be mistreated.

But ethics is, what do you do

when there's a situation that's more complicated?

How do we talk about the Ds?

You have to define the dilemma, discuss, debate, decide,

and debrief.

Debrief means we may not have gotten it right.

You and I may have come up with a way of using AI,

which sounds great, but it sucks.

Can we do a better job?

Can we do a better job next time?

So I encourage people, particularly those

who know about MI multiple intelligences,

to go to thegoodproject.org.

And I may regret this, but I do answer

every serious communication that I get,

because as somebody who's too old to travel around

and to begin new projects,

I try at least to be helpful to people

who sincerely reach out, including Johnny and Tim.

And yes.

Wow, Howard, thank you so much for that.

And man, what a great interview.

We could continue going on and on and on.

If you are loving this conversation too,

which is want to remind you,

there is the Busted Pencils Mailbag.

We would love to hear from you the number.

Of course, the 608-557-8577.

You can leave us a voicemail.

You can text us whatever it takes.

Let us know what you're thinking.

And again, questions for Howard.

We will make sure that we get them to him

and Howard, for everything, Howard Gardner,

getting books, Amazon.

Sure, or go to my website, HowardGardner.com.

And even though I may not know what's there,

all the answers are there.

Well, Howard, thank you so much as we say.

Thanks for Busting Pencils.

Thank you very much.

This was lots of fun.

And I'm glad to talk to teachers good off

and I'm talking to other groups.

But basically, ever since I was five years old,

I wanted to be a teacher

and to the extent I can still engage in educating

that makes me happy.

And now, for your moment of Zen.

Objectivity is not desirable

because if we want to have an effect on the world,

we need to emphasize those things

which will make students more active citizens

and more moral people.

Hey, listeners, thanks for listening to Busted Pencils.

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