MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES: SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE

Spatial intelligence includes both skill in navigation and the ability to visualize an object from various angles.

While today we depend on GPS systems, humanity has historically navigated land and sea without instruments. For example, Howard Gardner discusses the seafaring people of the Carolina Islands.

The navigator must memorize a series of star positions as seen from various islands.  During the trip from island to island he envisions a reference island as it passes under a particular star, and locates the position of the star overhead. From a mental navigation system, he calculates the number of segments completed; the proportion of the trip remaining; and any needed corrections in navigation. The navigator cannot see the islands as he sails along; instead he maps their locations in his mental “picture’ of the journey. (Gardner 1983.)

In the article, “Mind: Recognizing Spatial Intelligence,” (Gretory Park, David Lubinski, Camilla Benbow), Scientific American, Nov. 2, 2010), the authors define spatial ability as “a capacity for mentally generating, rotating, and transforming visual images,” and assert that it is one of the three specific cognitive abilities most important for developing expertise in learning and work settings.

Ninety years ago, Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman began an ambitious search for the brightest kids in California, administering IQ tests to several thousand of children across the state. Those scoring above an IQ of 135 (approximately the top 1 percent of scores) were tracked for further study. There were two young boys, Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, who were among the many who took Terman’s tests but missed the cutoff score. Despite their exclusion from a study of young “geniuses,” both went on to study physics, earn PhDs, and win the Nobel prize. 

The authors question how these two minds, both with great potential for scientific innovation, could slip under the radar of IQ tests? One explanation is that many items on Terman’s Stanford-Binet IQ test, as with many modern assessments, fail to tap into a cognitive ability known as spatial ability.

Modern research on cognitive abilities is revealing that spatial ability, also known as spatial visualization, plays a critical role in engineering and scientific disciplines. Yet more verbally-loaded IQ tests, as well as many popular standardized tests used today, do not adequately measure this trait, especially in those who are most gifted with it.

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Recently, public schools in Texas agreed to reinstate a mere 10 minutes of recess a day. As an educator for over 40 years, I have watched the ever-growing anxiety over ever-narrowing academic goals reach the point of near hysteria. People, who simply don’t see the brain development that is not being fostered while children sit in chairs 7 hours a day, are naturally unconcerned about excluding childhood pursuits out doors, in nature with the imagination (the inventive, envisioning faculty of the brain) going full tilt,

Does this thin band of focus, to the exclusion of the all-encompassing experiences of childhood, have costly consequences?  Apparently it could. For example a recent large longitudinal study at Duke University, (Wai, Lubinski, Benbow) demonstrated that the participants with relatively strong spatial abilities tended to gravitate towards, and excel in, scientific and technical fields such as the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics and computer science.

All teachers with any freedom to really teach have noticed how most children love activities that invite them to navigate interesting spaces, design three dimensionally and explore hand-held objects. There are countless reasons to restore childhood to children.

LINGUISTIC INTELLIGENCE

At the age of 10, T.S. Eliot created a Magazine called “Fireside. He was the sole contributor, and during three days of winter vacation, created 8 entire issues. Each contained poetry, adventure stories, a gossip column and humor. 

Howard Gardner writes that the gift of language is universal and its development among children is strikingly constant across cultures. Even deaf children invent their own sign language and use it surreptitiously.

My own work with children has convinced me that we hardly understand the surpassing play of intelligence that governs children’s ability to learn language. More than once a three year old who could not speak English upon arrival, became fluent with no special instruction within three months of playing with English speaking children.

The father of Whole Language, Don Holdaway asserts that another aspect of linguistic development, learning to read, draws on these very same processes. If our society would only break free of it’s fear-based rigidity that dictates a child must have such and such skills at such and such an age, we would see the brilliant beauty of this process at work in its own way and in its own time for each child.

Benjamin Franklin learned to be a writer by laboriously copying and recopying articles in The Spectator and other models. Contrary to the expression “born genius,” Franklin stressed “ingenuity,” which included the ability to learn from others. 

[B]eing still a Boy, and suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my Hand, and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in at Night under the Door of the Printing-House. It was found in the Morning and communicated to his Writing Friends when they call’d in as usual. They read it, commented on it in my Hearing, and I had the exquisite Pleasure, of finding it met with their Approbation, and that in their different Guesses at the Author none were named but Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

In Benjamin Franklin’s case, his own Will, his own Initiative to master linguistics skills drove his progress. One of the great challenges in modern education is to recognize and free the unique Individual Will of each and every child for self-expression. Even in our so-call A.P. courses, characterized by a step-up in demands on the intellect, fail to free the caged bird of Individual Will.

When astute thinkers decry the “dumbing down of education,” the sense of loss concerns something beyond the mechanical grasp of the three ‘r’s. It’s not more or the same or even stepped up momentum that is the key to graduating people of heightened culture, who throughout life love literature, and literary self-expression.

The golden key rests in the Individual Will of the Child. Like the heart and imagination, the Will is something to be evoked and nurtured, not suppressed; celebrated for its uniqueness, not overridden by curriculum; its unstoppable momentum given a clear path and fed with tantalizing opportunities from a True Teacher.

Sadly, in the current craze, the Cogs of Control freeze the intuitive/responsive flow of the True Teacher. But a current is building, reminiscent of the springtime flow of the river beneath the ice. Let us join this current and celebrate the development of the Individual Child Will as the source of all worthy literary expression Contrived assignments based on this or that skill, coerce mere trickles compared to the creative torrent of the unified force of the Heart, Imagination and Will.

LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCE

In 1983 Barbara Mclintock won the Nobel Prize for physiology for her work in microbiology. While deductive reasoning is the hallmark of science, her story illustrates an aspect of mathematical intelligence less frequently recognized. As a researcher for Cornell University a particularly illuminating event occurred.

Howard Gardner writes, “In the 1920’s Barbara was faced with a problem: while theory predicted 50 percent pollen sterility in corn, her research assistant (in the “field”) was finding plants that were only 25 to 30 percent sterile. Disturbed by this discrepancy, McClintock left the cornfield and returned to her office where she sat for half an hour thinking.”

In Barbara’s words, “Suddenly, I jumped up and ran back to the field. At the top of the field I shouted, “Eureka, I have it! I know what the 30% sterility is! …"

Since the science department wanted her to write a mathematical proof for this discovery she sat down to write out the calculations. After a series of intricate steps written on a brown paper bag, the results of the equation matched the results she had arrived at instantaneously in the field.

Barbara puzzled over how it was that she actually ‘knew’ in an instant, the solution that required several minutes to work through as an equation. “Why was I so sure?” she asked.

One reason I have loved this example from Multiple Intelligences so much, is because it illustrates similar incidents with children in math class. For many of them, most often boys, any kind of writing is a laborious, loathed process. Yet on more than one occasion the child has called out the answer, which I would not have expected him or her to know without the written steps in an equation.

Gardner addresses this nearly instantaneous process that is little understood, and therefore almost never facilitated in schooling. “It is the archetype of ‘raw intelligence’ or the problem-solving faculty which cuts across domains.”

There is also a feeling aspect, which remains to be fully appreciated In the chapter titled, “The Way of Science”, in the book, Inevitable Grace, Ferrucci includes, analogy, chance and discipline, but also curiosity and a sense of wonder.

An example of the extraordinary genius that exhibits this full spectrum genius, is Nikola Tesla, who included yet another domain to logical-mathematical intelligence. He cared about humanity, and wished his discoveries to freely improve our lives. Yet more than once, the cunning intelligences of greed and self-interest stole the gifts of this magnanimous intelligence.

We are living through a detour in the human journey, during which our society discounts the value of emotive, evocative, ethical teach/learning in order to cut to the chase. In other words many are held spellbound by a “more, more, faster, faster, sooner, sooner” frenzy of academic info-shoveling and measuring.  

I was so happy when a student handed me an article by Adam Grant in the Dallas Morning News (Sunday, February 28). It’s titled, “Let kids learn to create”.

Many parents take high test scores and participation in A.P. courses as indicators of prodigious intelligence. They equate this superiority in academics with the superior future success that they crave for their child prodigies.

According to Dr. Grant, Professor of Management and Psychology of the University of Pennsylvania, this is simply not true. According to studies, such child prodigies are not the movers and shakers of the future. Though they may prosper financially, as adults they seldom make waves, or offer innovative solutions for their companies. They may perform masterpieces on the piano, but seldom create their own.

It’s time to look deep into the heart and soul of humanity; to reach beyond common goals of status and financial success, toward the potential for greatness that beckons toward higher aspirations, harbingers of true genius.