Some General Occupations
Profiting from a Multiple Intelligences Perspective
by Clifford Morris | Homepage
Most of us have been conditioned to believe that:
Our capacity to be intelligent is of a singular entity
This cerebral capability resides only within our skin or inside our head
We are either born smart or dumb and we can not do much to improve this state
Human intelligence can be calculated best by timed paper-and-pen intelligence quotient (IQ) types of standardized tests.
Moreover, mainstream psychologists have led us to believe that having additional skills or talents in mathematics and language means doing well in school, and conversely, that having less of these two conventional intelligences means that we are going to be unsuccessful in school. This unsuccessful feeling about our cerebral competencies or cognitive capacities often continues on into our adult working lives. I believe that this is an incorrect assumption. The further we remove ourselves from the classroom, the more we realize that what is valued in school is, in the main, a linguistic-verbal and logical-mathematical type of (traditional) intelligence. While necessary and valuable for societal progress, success in the real world requires more than simply the 3 R's -- the ability to write, read, and to be able to solve complicated mathematical problems. Such skills are necessary for success, but they are not sufficient alone. Success also requires the knowledge of and identification of our many other gifts, skills, talents, competencies ... or as I have come to term them ... our hidden, or dormant or secret forms of multiple intelligences (MI).
I say all of the above based on my ongoing experiences working with school-aged youngsters, more specifically, as a public school classroom supply teacher who recently retired from the state-funded teaching profession. I do not agree with the conventional assumption which states that our intelligence is of the intellectual quotients (IQ) type, and that all of our cerebral smarts can be nicely distributed on a single bell shape curve, a most static way of thinking about cognitive potential that has existed for approximately the past century.
The newer notion that we have various secret intellectual talents lying dormant or hidden within and around us offers an intriguing context within which to investigate our ongoing cerebral behaviours and possible career options. This broader approach to cognitive capabilities can expand the employability of all workers, especially in a societal climate of rapid revolution, corporate adjustments, and cultural changes. This thesis that all of us possess many kinds of minds, or multiple types of intelligences, makes intuitive sense. By looking at ourselves in terms of a broader range of intellectual capabilities, and by being able to link our cognitive strengths to meaningful career possibilities, we can thus be empowered to take a more proactive charge of our own personal careers.
IQ Tests and Career Training
The mainstream standardized IQ tests, as it has existed for about the past 100 years, states that approximately 68% of the school population falls within one standard deviation of the norm. The norm or average range of intelligence as measured by IQ tests lies approximately between 85 and 110, plus or minus five points either way. For example, an IQ score of 113 is considered high average intelligence, an IQ score of 99 is within the average intelligence range. Conversely, and at the lower end of the IQ scale, a mentally handicapped program is usually recommended for those whose IQ fall within the 50-75 range, plus or minus five points. Unfortunately, many administrators of our state funded public schools use these IQ test scores to group students because, generally speaking, IQ tests are cheap to purchase, easy to administer and quite quick to score, especially to a large group of pupils. And perhaps as important as all of the above, IQ tests have been traditionally acceptable by the general public as the best and only way to measure our intelligence.
Let us however not throw the baby out with the bathwater ... as most standardized IQ tests are quite reliable. They continue to be used throughout most of the world by mainstream psychologists. However their validity, as a measure of intelligence or academic understanding leaves much to be desired. To use a comment of the times, they are okay as far as they go but they do not go very far. They are limited as a measure of overall cognitive capabilities. We have only to look within our community art galleries, the dance and movie theatres, our professional sporting facilities, to name just three, to observe many adults who are successful not only because of their linguistic-verbal and/or logical-mathematical competencies alone but because of their other dominant intelligences, as theorized by the Harvard University cognitive developmental scientist, Howard Earl Gardner.
Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences
Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, defines an intelligence as an ability to solve real-life problems, to generate new problems, and to create something meaningful or to offer a service that is valued within a person's culture or local community. He has identified at least eight distinct and separate areas of the brain for each of the intelligences.
Here is a very brief description of the eight intelligences:
Verbal-Linguistic: tell stories, write essays, participate in interviews, converse easily with peers
Logical-Mathematical: solve problems, balance check books, make and keep schedules, budgeting money
Visual-Spatial: paint, draw, develop web pages, decorate rooms, make cards, create scrapbooks
Bodily-Kinesthetic: engage in sports, enjoy moving body to music, enjoy walking tours, uses body language
Musical: attend concerts, playing instruments, hum melodies, singing with others, enjoy rhythm and rhyme
Intrapersonal: keep a personal journal, enjoy reading alone, study to answer personal questions about life
Interpersonal: join a web discussion, engage in various projects, enjoy debates
Naturalistic: collect wildflower specimens, enjoy hunting expeditions, follow an animal's footprints
Success requires the first two of the above eight intelligences: to compute, write and read well. Not being able to these IQ types of smarts adequately continues to be a disadvantage in our society. But our culture is also full of successful others who gained societal achievements via a mix of the other six intelligences.