Issue

Blink, and all music disappears from our culture. Blink again, and all sports disappear, all dance has vanished. In just a few more blinks, visual arts disappear, people lack cooperative interpersonal skills, and they lack self-understanding. When I imagine the absence of these five intelligences from my life and from the life of my community, I realize their importance. All should be nurtured in our schools.This year my school's theme is "Strength Through Diversity." This theme allows us to emphasize students' individual strengths, their areas of smartness, and to relish their differing abilities to "solve problems, or to fashion products, that are valued" in our school and community. In my school the factory model of education, leading all students down the same path of only linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, is long gone.Teachers don't have to reorganize the entire curriculum to put greater emphasis on multiple intelligences. The personal intelligences are at the core of many pro-social curriculums. The other intelligences can be nurtured by following a simple principle: input via one intelligence, and output via another intelligence. If linguistic intelligence is used to take in the information, I ask students to demonstrate their understanding of the information using a different intelligence—draw a picture, make up a skit, or put it into a song. This provides important processing time for students and stimulates their creativity. All of my students learn more by using their many ways of being smart.—Launa Ellison teaches at Clara Barton Public School in Minneapolis and is the author of Seeing With Magic Glasses.

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is appealing and could even be right. It's certainly reassuring to think that we are all smart in one way or another. For better or worse, however, a school's job is to develop verbal and mathematical capacity.Watching schools implement untested theories about "kinesthetic" or other intelligences when they can't teach reading looks suspiciously like one more fad. The hard truth is that today's youngsters, as never before, must hone their academic skills. Knowledge pays and pays handsomely; ignorance costs more than we can afford, individually or socially. Schools may want to teach English, mathematics, or physics by using music, dance, or football, but they cannot be permitted to lose sight of their academic mission.In our interconnected global economy, the academic and intellectual demands of citizenship and work cannot be dismissed as old-fashioned. Anything less than high academic standards works a cruel hoax on students. And the hoax is all the more cruel if it is worked on the disadvantaged. They have no coupons to clip, no old-boy networks. Of all our citizens, they have the most riding on a good education. To propose that they have a different "set" of intelligences—and cannot perform academically—comes perilously close to asserting that they can't learn what we expect of a well-educated citizen in a modern democracy. That's not only wrong, it's dangerous.—Denis Doyle is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the founder of Doyle Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in change management.

Schools have the responsibility to make sure that children acquire the skills they need to be whatever they choose as a life goal. Unfortunately, many traditional schools have made judgments about which life goals are valuable and which ones are not. These schools saturate students with linguistic and logical-mathematical activities. Traditional education perpetuates the myth that "the only important things you learn in school are numbers, facts, and letters and how to use them."Obviously, not all children will be artists, musicians, athletes, or psychologists. On the other hand, not all students will be writers, scientists, or mathematicians. Just as artists write, measure, and solve abstract problems during their schooling, the future mathematician should learn to look at the world with an aesthetic eye. In a multiple-intelligence approach, children have opportunities to learn problem solving in as many ways as education can offer.Children who do not read, write, or solve written math problems with ease often possess untapped strengths. If the school is sensitive to these strengths, it will offer many opportunities for success and bring these children to school every day for successful learning. Their weaknesses can then be addressed. Unfortunately, for many children the focus is solely on fixing weaknesses, not identifying strengths—and children often internalize failure if opportunities for success are not made equally available.—Carol White is the visual arts specialist at the Indianapolis Public Schools. She has been a staff member at Key Elementary School since its opening in 1987.

While at first blush the idea of putting equal emphasis on all seven of the intelligences identified by Gardner might have some appeal, the reality is that we are—and will likely remain—a society in which linguistic and logical-mathematical skills predominate. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate that educators place greater attention on these intelligences.Although other intelligences are important (pity the person who can't handle interpersonal relationships), we must all achieve some level of mastery in both language and logic. Children who are visual learners, for example, can be taught to use visual learning to cope in a world that relies heavily on linguistic communication and where daily interactions with everyone from the gas station attendant to one's boss depend on one's ability to think logically.One danger of addressing multiple intelligences is that some educators might be tempted to use, or inadvertently create, more elaborate forms of tracking that pigeonhole kids just as surely as traditional forms of tracking have done. Hence, teachers must work on all skills, even if some are given more emphasis than others. From my experience with my own children, I know that different kids learn differently at different stages in life. If we create narrow expectations, our expectations will be fulfilled.In the end, however, we must keep in mind that there is a common body of knowledge that we must impart to all children if they are to be successful. To do less is to cheat our young people and the nation.—Christopher Cross is president of the Council for Basic Education in Washington, D.C.