The first pillar of modern education has to do with how we view 'intelligence.

' The discovery of what we now call intelligence was made early in the Twentieth Century. Over time, research led to the development of IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests that distilled an individuals mental abilities down to a single number. Score 132 on the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, for example, and you qualify for Mensa. In the last several decades, the classical view of a singular, psychometric measure of intelligence has been challenged on a number of fronts. The leading theory challenging that view came from Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard. A developmental psychologist, Gardner worked in the fields of neurology and neuropsychology to better understand how the brain works how we think, reason and remember. He studied both normal children and adults, as well as gifted individuals. Included in the gifted category were savants, who exhibit an exceptional skill or brilliance in a narrow, limited field (such as music or mathematics) while being affected with a mental disability (think Rain Man). In 1983, Gardner published his seminal book, Frames of Mind, in which he proposed his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This theory suggests that the overall intelligence of an individual is actually a combination of a number of independent abilities, or intelligences. As originally conceived, Gardner identified seven intelligences that most humans have to varying degrees; in 1997, he added an eighth intelligence (Naturalistic). You can interactively explore Gardner's Multiple Intelligences on the next page.

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However, in our modern, paper-based education system, all intelligences are not created equal. In order to prepare the authors knowledge for the paper-page of a textbook, that knowledge had to be encoded into words . . . and only one of Gardners intelligences (Verbal-Linguistic intelligence) is predisposed to being adept at learning via words. If you have a low Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence, Musical intelligence, or Naturalistic intelligence, you can nonetheless thrive in a paper-based educational system as long as you have a high Verbal-Linguistic intelligence. But if, rather than have two left feet, you have a low Verbal-Linguistic intelligence, it can negatively impact your entire education. You simply are not tuned to the primary and dominant knowledge transmission medium (i.e. words on paper, or the spoken words of a teacher).

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As but one perspective on the scope of the challenge to our educational system, take the following data collected by faculty of Valencia Community College in Florida. Ninety students in their online criminal justice and speech courses were tested, and the results are depicted on the right. Two things stand out from this data. First, notice the very large percentage of students who scored high on the Intrapersonal scale. This makes sense when you consider that the students were all taking an online course and those with high Intrapersonal intelligence like working alone and learn best through independent study. Second, notice that, of all the intelligences, Verbal-Linguistic intelligence had the lowest percent scoring high. Only one in five were predisposed to learn via words, while two in five scored low on the Verbal-Linguistic scale. Ironically, it is easy to imagine that, soon after taking the Multiple Intelligence test, the 36 students who scored low on the Verbal-Linguistic scale went back to their coursework reading.

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The second pillar of modern education has to do with how educators look at cognitive development. In the early 1950s, Benjamin Bloom (Ph.D. in Education) and his team at the University of Chicago developed a high-level classification of learning objectives for students. This classification is known today as Blooms Taxonomy. Bloom divided educational objectives into three domains: Affective, Psychomotor, and the one were concerned with here the Cognitive Domain. Within the Cognitive Domain, Bloom identified six levels of thinking skills. While 'remembering' is a very complex process, In Bloom's Taxonomy, it is the lowest, entry level skill. Soccer provides a useful analogy. When considering the ball handling skills of a soccer player, the first thing a player has to be able to do is to trap the ball. Once the player has the ball, s/he has to be able to dribble, pass, and shoot the ball. When learning something new, the first thing a student has to do is trap the knowledge. Coming up from the page, the knowledge has to pass through what is known as working memory, where the text is decoded and sent off to long-term memory. Knowledge known.

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Once the student has the knowledge (remembers it), s/he has to be able to understand the knowledge, apply it, analyze it, evaluate it, and synthesize it . . . each is an essential cognitive skill that any good player thinker should possess and should practice regularly. And just as a soccer player cant shoot the ball if s/he cant trap the ball, a student will have a very difficult time developing his/her higher order thinking skills if s/he struggles simply learning. You can interactively explore Bloom's Taxonomy on the right. Now, all those indications that our education system is failing, all the test scores that chronicle the dire circumstance we find ourselves in . . . they all overwhelmingly measure memory; and short-term

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