Rethinking education - Part one

Back to Howard Gardner, Professor of Education at Harvard, who published a great book, Frames of Mind, in 1983. According to Howard, we are all born intelligent. He says there are eight and a half kinds of intelligence (of which only one is “logico-mathematical” and another “linguistic” - the two bases of the old IQ test). All of us have these intelligences, and any of us can, with motivation, encouragement and preparation, become very good at anything.

That doesn't mean that we can all be Wimbledon champions, because we have constructed competitive tennis to produce only one winner. But we could all, for the sake of argument, be good enough to enter. Yes, some of us will turn out to have slightly faster reflexes, or slightly sharper hand-eye co-ordination than others, but then we might have a tad less encouragement or preparation. Sport is like that.

And we only have one life. It takes time to develop and hone any of our intelligences, and while we're doing that the others are not growing much. That sad truth gives us the absent-minded professor, the inarticulate sportsman, the speakers who completely misread audiences, and so on. It means that our potential can never be completely fulfilled: we simply don't live long enough if 85 years is all that we have.

But it does mean that we need to think again about what education is for. The reason that some kids don't seem educable while others are keen and interested has enormously to do with their upbringing so far. Those loved and encouraged by their parents to develop their potential will be revealing this plainly at age five.

Those whose parents (or parent) are simply too busy, or uninterested in their kids, or unaware of the huge importance of these early years, or think that all this is the school's job, will deliver five-year-olds to school who are unlikely to make the teacher's life an uplifting experience and will get little out of school themselves.

There are two strong reasons for seeing schools, and indeed the whole educational system, as needing a thorough re-think - especially from the perspective of “multiple intelligences” (Gardner's term). One is that to do so is democratic and egalitarian. If we are all born with all the talents we need to become self-actuating, responsible and self-sufficient adults, then our society should ensure that we have that opportunity.

The other is that to do so is a form of good management. People who have an active creative life, whether it be in painting, music, reading, bush-walking or anything else, are most unlikely to engage in burglaries, homicide, assault or other crime. Creativity, the use of our intelligences in a satisfying way, is life-enhancing and confidence-boosting; we learn more about ourselves and learn from each other. We are less interested in money and material things.

Our criminal justice system costs about $7 billion a year, and it is rising faster than inflation. To keep people in prison costs about the same, in daily terms, as keeping them in a five star hotel, though much less pleasantly for the guests. Alas, our schools and the way we construct them, with winners and losers defined (in fact, though not in theory) largely in terms of the child's more or less fortunate upbringing, are at the moment part of the problem.

We could make them part of the solution. But to do so we first have to get rid of the odious notion that somehow parents have the right of “choice”, which means that those who have sufficient money can choose and those who don't, can't. Wealthy parents can choose, in effect, to buy positional goods for their children, like access to excellent schools, extra coaching, computers and libraries. That will make the children look “brighter” and give them an extra opportunity to do well at exams.

There is no easy solution to any of this, but knowing about it is the first step. Ideally, children should be born into happy relationships between creative and self-confident adults, and prepared, motivated and encouraged in an almost disinterested fashion (meaning that the parents are not seeking to have their child live out some parental dream).

But of course this is not an ideal world, although it is a distinct improvement on the Australia of the 1950s. We can't improve the school system until Australians understand that they are - all of them - capable of many different careers, creative pastimes and sports, and that capability applies to the newly born as well.

I'm much less impressed with winners and winning than I once was. I'm much more impressed with the possibilities for a good society that are evident in the huge numbers that have been to university, engage in artistic creativity of all kinds and look after themselves.

That, I think, ought to be the position of those responsible for governing us. But it isn't, not yet.