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Re: [OM] BIGGER GAME

Subject: Re: [OM] BIGGER GAME
From: Bob Whitmire <bwhitmire@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:46:29 -0400
At the risk of leaping to faulty or facile conclusions, I wonder if trying to 
suss out intelligences is like trying to figure out how many angels really can 
dance on the head of a pen, er, pin. Beyond that, I also wonder even if we 
could suss it out, could human beings be trusted with any sort of qualitative, 
quantifiable roster of intelligences--mostly due to our inherent need to rank 
such things according to whichever desirability is fashionable at the time. 
Which is to say, down that slope lies tyranny and oppression. I'm pretty sure.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what intelligence is. Knowledge? Common 
sense? Ability to assess and act? (See Andrew's last quoted line.) Or is 
ability to act separate from ability to assess? I'm getting a headache thinking 
about it. 

I do know that our collective political intelligence, if that's the right word, 
is pretty much aimed at the lowest common denominator, minus two. Not to sound 
too effing esoteric, but it's positively Planckian. 

--Bob



On Apr 12, 2011, at 7:03 PM, Andrew Fildes wrote:

> In the final years of my teaching, one very popular concept was 'multiple 
> intelligences'. It's an idea started by Howard Gardner who was interested in 
> the obvious and provable idea that we all tend to learn in different ways and 
> we tend to be good at different things. He talked this up into a concept of 
> different 'intelligences'. Not too bad so far. However this has been seized 
> on by the education system as a plausible argument to claim that every person 
> or student has an intelligence. That hulking, brain-dead thug at the back of 
> the class has a physical or mechanical intelligence and we just haven't 
> tapped into it yet. This is reinforced by the strange idea that we are all 
> equal, in some sense. Therefore we must all be equally intelligent, right?! 
> And it's just a matter of finding out how.
> 
> <snip>

> Yes I'm hopeless at music, languages and crosswords but I'm good in certain 
> other areas so a test would have to measure outside these 'good ats' - for 
> instance, the ability to comprehend and assess complex scenarios without 
> leaping to faulty or facile conclusions.


-- 
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