For many years children (and adults) have been victims of a notion of intelligence that doomed them to a particular category for the whole of their lives.
Typically, children were considered as "weak". "slow", "dull", "below average", "average", "bright", "very bright", "superior", "very superior", "genius" or "gifted".
These labels arose primarily from the scoring systems of intelligence tests that placed children in a particular range of intelligence. Severely retarded: IQ below 40; Moderate: IQ 4059; Mild: IQ 60-74; Dull: IQ 7589; Average: IQ 90-109; Bright: IQ 110-119; Superior: IQ 120130; Very superior: IQ 130-140; Genius: IQ 140.
Children scoring in the below 40 IQ category generally show detectable brain damage. Curiously, most of the children scoring in the moderate category do not show any evident brain damage; however many of them show considerable emotional and social distress.
These latter distresses would not have been considered in the evaluation of their intelligence. Nevertheless, there is now abundant evidence that children who require special needs education are most in need of emotional help, particularly in the areas of self-worth and family and other relationships. A healing of these areas is the launch pad to further school learning.
The assumption is that intelligence tests measure intelligence; a further assumption is that the two major scales of an IQ test (verbal and performance scales) measure left and right brain intelligence.
Intelligence tests do not measure intelligence. They are an absolutely crude measure and it is best that these tests no longer be called intelligence tests. It is more accurate to say IQ tests are measures of knowledge of a culture.
For example, if you administer an IQ test to an Irish and an Aborigine population, the Aborigines will score extremely low on "verbal intelligence" but score off the record on "performance intelligence". The Irish will score above average on the verbal scale but below average on the performance scale.
What intelligence tests somewhat effectively measure are either knowledge of a culture or differences in knowledge between two different cultures. Irish culture has become very verbally biased whereas Aborigines are forest-dwellers and require a more performance type of knowledge to survive and thrive in their environment.
It is well documented that there is no intelligence test that is culture free. What is not documented is the next logical conclusion to that fact and that is IQ tests are measures purely of knowledge of a culture.
The current thinking on the notion of multiple intelligences (as opposed to the concept of global intelligence) is still based on the old philosophy of different levels of intellectual endowment, but with the added dimension of different types of intelligence.
The present count is seven and comprises: linguistic intelligence (the capacity to use words effectively); logico-mathematical intelligence (the capacity to use numbers effectively); spatial intelligence (the ability to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately); bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (expertise in using one's whole body to express ideas and feelings); musical intelligence (the capacity to perceive, discriminate, transform and express musical forms); interpersonal intelligence (the ability to perceive and make distinctions in the moods, intentions, motivations and feelings of other people); intrapersonal intelligence (selfknowledge and the ability to act adaptively on the basis of that knowledge).
This model of seven intelligences is still regarded as a tentative formulation and other intelligences that have been proposed include humour, creativity, culinary (cooking) ability, olfactory perception (sense of smell), intuition, spirituality, sexuality, moral sensibility and an ability to synthesise the other intelligences.
The danger with the idea of multiple intelligences is that future IQ testing will resemble a personality test and lead to the old fixed scoring categorisations of levels of intelligence in each of the multiple intelligences. Children may be confined now to certain areas of knowledge because "the test" shows where their intellectual potential lies.
It is more accurate to say that these multiple areas of intelligence represent areas of knowledge. The human psyche will keep developing new knowledge and skill areas in order to adapt to and understand the nature of the universe in which it resides. The intellectual potential to do that is always present - limitless and indefatigable.
Science backs the notion of limitless capacity when it states that human beings only use one to two per cent of the billions of brain cells that they possess. How then can there be talk of levels of intelligence, or levels of different types of intelligence?
It seems more logical to perceive that every human being (when no brain damage is present) possesses vast intellectual potential and that potential can be applied to developing multiple kinds of knowledge.
