Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Howard Gardner 83
question that this linguistic-logical combination is important for mastering the agenda of school,
he contends, but educators have gone too far in ignoring the other intelligences.
As teachers de-emphasize the other six intelligences, Gardner argues that we relegate numerous
students to the domain of “low ability.” A multiple-intelligence grounded curriculum, he
promises, would preclude such relegation and help all students succeed. Thus, Gardner’s educational
psychology insists that educational leaders should examine the eight MI and make sure they
are implemented in the general curriculum and the everyday life of the classroom. Students could
benefit from an awareness of the intelligences they possess, how they operate in their learning,
and how such an awareness might inform career choices.
When many of us concerned with the postformal issues of cultivating the intellect while
concurrently working for social, educational, and economic justice first read Gardner’s theory of
MI in 1983, we were profoundly impressed by the challenge he issued to traditional educational
psychology, psychometrics in particular. We believed that Gardner stood with us in our efforts
to develop psychological and educational approaches that facilitated the inclusion of students
from marginalized groups whose talents and capabilities had been mismeasured by traditional
psychological instruments. Gardner’s theory appeared to assume a wider spectrum of human
abilities that were for various reasons excluded from the domain of educational psychology and
the definition of intelligence. We taught MI theory to our students in hopes of exposing and
overcoming some of the ways particular students were hurt by these exclusionary disciplinary
practices. As Gardner has continued to develop his theory over the last twenty years, those of
us associated with postformalism and critical pedagogy grew increasingly uncomfortable with
many of his assertions and many of the dimensions he excluded from his work. Simply put, we
did not believe that MI theory was succeeding at what it claimed as its cardinal goal: helping
students from diverse backgrounds and cognitive orientations succeed in school.
Gardner’s Frames of Mind was enthusiastically received by sectors of a public intuitively
unhappy with psychometrics’ technocratic and rationalistic perspective on human ability. Within
the narrow boundaries of the American culture of scholarship, Gardner became a celebrity.
Teachers emerging from a humanistic culture of caring and helping were particularly taken
with the young (forty is young in the world of academia!) scholar, many traveling all over the
country to hear him speak. Multiple intelligences, such teachers maintained, provided them with
a theoretical grounding to justify a pedagogy sensitive to individual differences and committed
to equity. Though Gardner consistently denied the political dimension of MI, liberal teachers
and teacher educators viewed it as a force to democratize intelligence. Living in a Eurocentric
world, many interpreted Gardner to be arguing that cognitive gifts are more equally dispersed
throughout diverse cultural populations than mainstream psychology believed. They took MI as
a challenge to an inequitable system.
Frames of Mind struck all the right chords:
� Learning is culturally situated.
� Different communities value different forms of intelligence.
� Cognitive development is complex, not simply a linear cause–effect process.
� Creativity is an important dimension of intelligence.
� Psychometrics does not measure all aspects of human ability.
� Teaching grounded on psychometrically inspired standardized testing is often deemed irrelevant and trivial
by students.
Numerous teachers, students, parents, everyday citizens, and some educational psychologists
deemed these ideas important. And, we agree, they are—especially in light of the positivist