Zan Boag: In your book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, you proposed the idea that we all possess different types of intelligences, that the majority of us have a range of these abilities or intelligences to some degree. What was the reaction back in the early 1980s to this challenge to the thinking of the time, that there was a singular intelligence?
Howard Gardner: Let me give a little background. I was not a student of intelligence. I was a cognitive developmental psychologist. The school at which I worked, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, got a very sizable grant to study the nature and realisation of human potential. And as a cognitive psychologist, my job was to study the nature and realisation of human potential. It’s a big topic! As I’ve quipped, “it’s a West Coast topic in the United States. It’s not an East Coast topic.” I took full advantage of this bequest and travelled around the world and interviewed dozens of people. I had a skilled research staff. It became clear to me that the notion of a single mind and a single intellectual or cognitive capacity was much too limiting.
But I might have written a book called Multiple Talents or Multiple Gifts or even Multiple Computations, and then it’s quite possible that nobody would’ve paid attention to it. Nobody knows when I decided to call it Multiple Intelligences. It was a pluralisation of the word intelligence – which probably at that time would’ve gotten an asterisk on my computer – that really made me famous for 15 minutes.
One of the things I now know is that a lot of different factors lead to something going viral. One of them was a real fundamental re-examination of the American education system that occurred just at that time. And so while I thought my book was really for psychologists and biologists, the book took off much more in education circles than it ever did in the harder sciences.
Nonetheless, to get back to your question, to be a little bit epigrammatic, I think the rest of the world pretty much accepts these ideas. Psychologists don’t – particularly within psychology, those who are called psychometricians, whose bread and butter is creating tests. They don’t like the theory for two opposite reasons.
One, it’s a challenge to the IQ test, which has been a resource of income and interest in psychology for a hundred years.
Second of all, most of the intelligences which I described cannot be measured in a short paper and pencil test. And the bread and butter of psychology is to have a brief instrument where you can say, “Ah, this is how good your memory is. This is how good your attention span is. This is how well you recognise faces. This is how good you are at
