The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

SUNDAY, MARCH 20
PRESENTATIONS – The World Wide World
Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education: Singular integrity
When Howard Gardner was just a child, the US-born son of Holocaust refugees, his
parents took him for a pricey (in those days) $300 aptitude test at Stevens Institute.
“Your son is very good at lots of things, but his greatest gifts are in the clerical area,”
they were told. “He has a bright future.” Most likely the testers were thinking of the
kind of tasks that are automated by e-commerce websites today. The test totally
missed the burning intelligence and insatiable curiosity that have made Gardner so
revered as a thinker, rather than a clever phrase-maker.
To the public, Gardner is best-known for his theory of multiple intelligences: “The
fact that somebody is good in one thing is no indication of whether they’ll be good
at something else.” He adds, “I would never have pursued this intuition if I hadn’t
been doing two separate kinds of research as a young scholar in the 1970s. I was
working partly with brain-damaged adults, ‘Oliver Sacks style,’ and partly with gifted
children. The leap was to call different capabilities – such as facility with words,
musical talent, spatial manipulation – ‘separate intelligences’.”
“Most people instinctively understand it,” he says. “The people who like my work the
least are the testmakers, because they have so much invested in the notion of IQ as
covering virtually all intelligence and they are constrained to certain kinds of instruments.
But if I want to find out if you have what I call ‘interpersonal intelligence,’ I’m
not going to ask you 20 multiple-choice questions; I’m going to put you in a group
and see who’s taking orders from whom two hours later.”
As he grows older and wiser (he is 61), Gardner has started thinking about the uses to
which intelligence is put.“I’m very influenced by A.O. Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice
and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, written in 1970.
As he says, if you’re in an organization, you owe it a certain amount of loyalty. But if
you don’t like the way things are headed in the organization, you have a duty so speak
up, and eventually perhaps to exit. One of the worst states to befall people is to fall
out of favor with the group they want to be in. . .yet sometimes it’s their duty to
undergo that rejection. It’s hard for young people to understand. It’s loyalty to an
abstract notion of what something should be, rather than to the thing itself.”
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