Author: Ophelia Benson

Multiple intelligences. Why has the idea always made me want to laugh? Because I’m a mean rotten swine, that’s why. Obviously. Yes but also because it is quite funny. It’s so easy to think of more of those alternative intelligences. Watching tv intelligence, eating intelligence, using the potty intelligence.

Now, one aspect of the general idea seems perfectly unexceptionable.

Gardner’s ideas appealed to many traditional teachers who extolled hard work but also had some students who did better on tests if multiplication tables were set to music or works of literature were acted out in class.

Well, obviously – if it works, do it. (That is, do it if you can, which seems unlikely when most teachers have classes of 30 to 35 students, five times a day. When are they going to get the time to teach everyone differently?) But that’s a different thing from drawing large conclusions about multiple intelligences.

This summer, two university professors accused Gardner, 61, of encouraging elementary school teaching methods, such as singing new words or writing them out with twigs and leaves, for which there is no scholarly evidence of success. Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote in the journal Education Next that Gardner’s theory “is an inaccurate description of the mind” and that “the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective.”

And Gardner says one thing that’s slightly alarming.

He added that “the standard psychologist’s view of intelligence is a recipe for despair. It holds that there is but one intelligence and that intelligence is highly heritable.”

Yes but…the fact that something is a recipe for despair is a separate question from whether there is good evidence for it or not. Sad to say, there are a lot of accurate descriptions of the world that are indeed recipes for despair, as well as hopeful ones that are not accurate. Gardner’s benevolence is a good thing, but benevolence-driven research can get things badly wrong.

Well it’s that time again. Yup, it is – I know that’s hard to believe, but it is. September 10. It’s our birthday. We’re two. Two!! Would you believe it! Well of course you would, why not – but still it does seem very respectable and elderly and established. They haven’t driven us away yet! They haven’t shut us down, they haven’t silenced us, they haven’t sent a plague of locusts. We’re still here! (Who’s they? Oh you know, just the paranoid’s fantasy army. All those faceless Darth Vader types in black plastic outfits who were going to better I mean butter I mean batter down the doors and throw our computers out the window and trample on us until we whimpered and promised to go to Business School.)

And we’re not only still here, we have a book coming out in a few weeks. B&W’s first book. Awww. Don’t websites grow up quickly these days. One minute it just has a logo and nothing else, and the next thing you know it has a book slung over its shoulder and another on the way. (Has nobody heard of birth control these days? I blame the Pope.)

You would probably like to look at last year’s celebration. It was very rowdy. You wouldn’t think it to talk to me, but I am one hell of a rowdy partyer. I get drunk the instant I cross the threshold, I turn the music up until the plaster starts falling off the walls, I aim food in the general direction of my mouth and usually miss, I grope everyone that breathes including the hamster, I smash glasses in the fireplace, and I dance the tarantella. I am fun, man. A few days in the slammer are a small price to pay.

I don’t know if you ever have a look at our Letters page, but if you don’t, you might want to. There are some very interesting letters in there – some of them are brief articles in themselves. I’ve just seen one of that kind, the one at the top of the page (at the moment), a short essay on the Whig interpretation of history and moral relativism (taking issue with an article of ours on the subject), by one Michael Davis. If I had the faintest idea who he was or how to email him, I would ask him if he would like to write an article for us. I wonder if he is the same MD as the MD who wrote some previous letters and quite a few comments here. Anyway, his letter is well worth a read.

Okay, I give up, you win.

For months (months? weeks? years? I forget) I’ve been kind of defending CT to my colleague. Kind of – which means admitting they have a tendency to groupthink, to call people trolls just because they disagree with them, but still thinking they (CT, that is) have their good points. But I give it up.

Everyone knows that comments can get out of hand. A lot of blogs don’t have them; a lot have them only for some threads; a lot have them intermittently, disabling them when things get tiresome. It is also sometimes possible to keep things civil by asking people to be civil, and/or by deleting comments when they’re not. I’ve only deleted comments here once – but then that’s not surprising: the people who read B&W are a civil, polite, rational crowd.

So that’s one way to keep things civil. Another way is just to tell people to go fuck themselves – which seems like a fairly oxymoronic method, frankly. Seems to defeat the purpose. Also it seems ill-advised to resort to it just because you disagree with what a commenter has said, as opposed to because the commenter has gotten out of hand. Well – you know what I’m going to say. No, you don’t, quite, because I didn’t actually get sworn at – I got threatened with being sworn at. But I’m afraid I just don’t find that kind of thing conducive to interesting or rewarding discussion. I can get plenty of that kind of thing in my own living room, thank you very much, I don’t need to go elsewhere for it.

But more to the point, I find it too symptomatic of what Jerry S is talking about – too indicative of what he’s been saying all along. Too groupthinky, too orthodoxy-enforcing. So. I’ll just do my talking here, where men are men and the beer is flat.