In an interview in the mid-1980s in a British psychology journal, Howard Gardner explained how he was being intentionally confrontational in his use of the term intelligences to form the basis for his renowned theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983, 1993). Gardner remarked:

I’m deliberately being somewhat provocative. If I’d said that there’s seven kinds of competences, people would yawn and say, “Yeah, yeah.” But, by calling them “intelligences,” I’m saying that we’ve tended to put on a pedestal one variety called intelligence, and there’s actually a plurality of them . . . (Weinreich-Haste 1985, p. 48).

In this book, I’d like to do something similar with the word genius. This word, even more than the word intelligence, has come to be associated with elite performances: scores of 130 or higher on I.Q. tests; extraordinary feats in music, art, and literature; and the very highest demonstrations of human competence in other domains as well. I recall a talk I gave in Berkeley, California, on “Awakening the Genius of Every Child” several years ago; a well-known East Coast sculptor in attendance became absolutely enraged at my use of the term genius. He felt that I was attempting to democratize a term that was clearly in his mind the province of only a very few rare individuals whose achievements he feared would be diluted by being thrown in with the masses in a sort of “Einstein is Everyman” approach to learning.

It’s not my intention in this book to argue that every child is an Einstein. There was only one Einstein. As you will see in Part 1, I am using the word genius in a much broader and deeper way, in a way that is actually much truer to its original meanings. As the reader begins this book, it will become apparent that I’m using the word genius in a way that closely links it to words such as creativity, vitality, potential, motivation, and the joy of learning. However, if I used those terms, people would just yawn and say, “Yeah, yeah. We’ve heard all that before.” So, taking my cue from Dr. Gardner, I’m being deliberately provocative in choosing the word genius. And yet, just as Gardner’s use of intelligences was perfectly appropriate for a discussion of other ways of knowing, so the word genius is a wonderful choice for a way to talk about that very deepest source of what drives the learning process in every child.

Part of what motivates me to write this book is a concern that we’ve lost touch in education with the sheer joy of what it means to learn something new. Observe a baby in the act of learning. You’ll notice explosions of excitement, flailing of arms, bright eyes, and a kind of “dance of life.” I’m troubled that modern educators have become so caught up in the world of standards, curriculum, assessment, discipline, management, budgets, politics, and bureaucracy that they have lost the ability to see clearly the simple truth of the joy of learning as the crucial foundation stone for everything else in learning. In his celebrated “rhythm of education” model, Whitehead (1932) describes three stages in learning: a period of romance, in which one celebrates the vitality and passion that accompany learning; a period of precision, in which one must commit sometimes substantial energy toward acquiring specific skills on the way to mastery of a subject; and a period of generalization, in which one directly applies this new learning to practical situations. As educators, we’ve spent almost all of our time focused on the last two stages and neglected the first stage: the romance of learning.

Recently, I did a computer search of the literature in ERIC (Educational Resources Information Clearinghouse) for citations related to the “joy of learning.” Between 1982 and 1996 there were 13 “hits” and only two actual research studies related to the term. On the other hand, for “learning disabilities” there were 7,322 citations. This says a lot about priorities in educational research. I suspect that there might be an inverse relationship between these two sets of numbers. In other words, as we learn more about the joy of learning, we might have less need to find out about its agonies. It’s my hope that Awakening Genius in the Classroom will provide new impetus for educators to make the inner genius of students and the joy of learning major research priorities for the new millennium.

Another reason that I decided to write this book is because of the overwhelming success of the theory of multiple intelligences over the past few years and my fear that its success could well keep educators from seeing its true significance. “Multiple intelligences” has become an educational slogan, joining “cooperative learning,” “authentic assessment,” “learning styles,” and a number of other terms in education’s latest group of buzzwords. Scores of books with lesson plans are now available (see, for example, Armstrong 1994, Bruetsch 1995, Campbell et al. 1996, Fogarty and Stoehr 1995, Haggerty 1995, Lazear 1991). So are checklists and formal and informal measures for assessing multiple intelligences (Bellanca et al. 1994, Shearer 1996, Teele 1992), posters and comic books on MI theory (Margulies 1995), videos (Gardner 1995, Armstrong 1997), audiotapes, and training programs. There is nothing wrong with the explosion of MI materials (I’ve quite liberally contributed to them myself). However, I fear that people will now relate to multiple intelligences in terms of these materials, seeing MI theory as a fad or “thing” rather than as a deeper attitude toward honoring the different kinds of knowing that exist in our students.

I observe subtle signs of this “thingism” developing around the United States. I’ve seen hints of supervisors with evaluation sheets in hand going into classrooms expecting to see each of the intelligences used in a teacher’s lesson plans. I’ve seen evidence of teachers and administrators using tests and checklists (mine included) to put kids into categories, like the “BK [bodily-kinesthetic] learner” or the “spatial kid,” which can serve only to limit children’s potentials rather than open them up. I’ve seen MI theory serve as new wine poured into old wineskins, with teachers simply relabeling the status quo using MI terms without changing anything at all in the way they teach, or merely introducing token activities (“Oh yes, I used MI . . . we do raps in math”) without thinking about what really has to change in their fundamental attitudes about children, development, learning, school reform, and the ultimate purposes of education itself.

I hope that by going back to what I believe is the most fundamental issue in education—the intrinsic joy of learning or “genius” that every student possesses—I can re-emphasize why multiple intelligences has the potential to be so transformational in education and, at the same time, I can help remind teachers why most of us got into teaching in the first place. It certainly wasn’t the money. And it probably wasn’t to help children master page 24 of a phonics worksheet or to assist them in checking the correct answer on a standardized test. More likely it had something to do with getting kids excited about learning and helping them realize their fullest potential. I hope that this book will serve to awaken educators into thinking about multiple intelligences in a deeper way by reminding them why multiple intelligences was such a great idea when it first came out: because it provided a powerful language for describing the learning process in all of its richness and diversity. If multiple intelligences represents the rainbow of learning, then genius is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I hope the Awakening Genius in the Classroom will reconnect you to an understanding of the “gold” that exists inside each one of your students and that it will give you a living structure for making that rich treasure available to your students so that they can brighten the world around them.