Did you know that you are smart in all sorts of different ways?" Niki Mitchell is addressing her class of kindergartners on one of their first days at Coyote Creek Elementary School in Highland Ranch, Colo., a spanking-new middle-class suburb of Denver. A dozen neatly dressed five-year-olds sit on the floor in front of Mitchell as she points to a chart on the wall that lists different kinds of "smart." She describes each of them. "Maybe you like to draw pictures. That means you're picture-smart," she offers, then explains what it means to be word-smart, number-smart, body-smart, people-smart and music-smart... "We're lots of these smarts," she says.
The children in Mitchell's class are among the newest initiates of the philosophy that is probably exciting more educators than any other right now. Like many schools around the country, Coyote Creek has based its instruction on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, or MI. Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, first proposed the theory in his book Frames of Mind, which was published in 1983. Since then, Gardner's ideas have received widespread attention and acceptance among parents and have been eagerly embraced by teachers. "Multiple intelligences is clearly the biggest thing right now," says Jim Bellanca, president of a teacher-training company called SkyLight Publishing and Training. Bellanca says that since 1992, SkyLight has provided training in MI to some 30,000 teachers and school administrators.
The increasing use of MI in schools raises a very simple question: Is this a good thing? The answer is not so simple, but there are good reasons to have doubts about this trend. To be sure, cognitive psychologists and educational researchers tend to give Gardner high praise for helping the public understand that intelligence is multifaceted, and MI has undoubtedly helped teachers understand and value the various talents a child has. Nevertheless, evidence for the specifics of Gardner theory is weak, and there is no firm research showing that its practical applications have been effective. No one says that using MI in schools is directly injurious. The danger is that it leads to wasted time, to an emphasis on less important skills and to a false sense that learning has taken place when it has not.
Sitting in his spare office at Harvard on a recent morning, a small dugout canoe made by his son resting on a nearby table, Howard Gardner talked about his work and the use others have made of it. A slender man with a soft face and hair flopping over his forehead, Gardner looks a bit like the concert pianist he might have been if he had pursued that career. After a long discussion of the merits of his theory, he tried to sum up his views. "Here's a credo I've never stated before," he said. "I'm sure there are lots of different intelligences. I'm sure kids differ in their profiles. I'm sure an educational approach that pays attention to this is going to be more effective than one that denies it."