03 Feb 2015

What if I told you everyone learns differently? You’d probably nod your head because this seems like an obvious statement. Some people learn visually while others can learn via intangible methods. Why is it okay, then, to teach all students through the same methods?

Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist, author of the “Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” whose work has had a profound impact on thinking and learning education. Gardner explains, “we are all able to know the world through language, logical mathematical analysis, spatial representation, musical thinking, the use of the body to solve problems or to make things, an understanding of other individuals and an understanding of others individuals.” In short, human beings are capable of seven relatively independent forms of information processing, differing from one another in the specific profile of intelligences that they exhibit.

Individuals differ in the strength of these intelligences and in the ways in which such intelligences are invoked and combined to carry out different tasks, solve diverse problems, and progress in various domains. Gardner says that these differences “challenge an educational system that assumes that everyone can learn the same materials in the same way and that a uniform, universal measure suffices to test student learning.”

We’re holding ourselves back by continuing this endless cycle of insisting everyone learn by the same methods and at the same pace. Gardner’s work is only one example of the immeasurable amounts of research produced in defense of revitalizing the educational systems we currently have. The pressure to succeed is structured in a broken system and the acceptance of failure is defined by the wrong standards.

So why does it hurt so badly to fail when the standards are wrong? Because it sucks not to do as well as the people around you, simple as that. An aptitude test can’t tell you what you felt digging trenches in South Africa. An ATAR score can’t explain the life skills you have from growing up in an impoverished family. Exams aren’t designed with an understanding to relativity in real world application because schools were founded on basic understandings; new information provides us a new understanding of who we are as human beings.

I’m good with words, but numbers give me a headache. You like motorbikes but can’t draw. Your sister sings but history bores her. Your parents are lawyers, your uncle’s a doctor, and you want to teach preschoolers how to draw circles. There’s nothing wrong with the differences, it’s just a matter of coming to terms with them. You are born with access to all 9 types of intelligence, just like everybody else, but we can’t measure which will present itself more prominently if we keep recycling archaic methods of education.

Where does that leave you? More open-minded toward your capabilities on a different scale of measure. Trust yourself more than you trust the word of an outdated system and use the resources we provide you to succeed when you “fail” out of the school system. We were spit out of that same system and have just a bit more time in that “real world” we were told we “weren’t prepared for” and aren’t choosing to leave you behind like the school systems are.

We’re rewriting education from a different direction because we feel the system we are products of prepared us to survive a lifestyle that no longer exists. Home economics taught me how to bake a cake, but not how to do home finances. I can square root but I can’t balance a checkbook, do my taxes, or figure out when is a good time for me to get a credit card. We’re a generation on the move and have to figure things out on our own, but we aren’t really alone. We have each other and, Gen-Y, we need to start acting like it.