INTELLIGENT people are celebrated everywhere around the world. There are many organisations and institutions that run many campaigns to discover raw talents and provide them with everything they need to become an asset to their institutions.
In the Renaissance era, kings and elites supported artists and sculptors for their whole lives in order to receive a high-quality work, which is still appreciated and celebrated to this day.
However, this situation is not possible for different disciplines that are less desirable. Despite this, we still see the emergence of different talents and skills that change the perspective of the world such as Michael Jackson, Mozart, Steve Irwin, and Lionel Messi, who are masters of their respective fields.
Understanding intelligence from different perspectives only became possible in the recent years, with numerous research finally focusing on understanding intelligences in humans.
Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor, first coined the theory of Multiple Intelligences in 1983.
Gardner proposes that there are 8 types of intelligence in humans, which are spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligence.
Each of these types hold different definitions and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Gardner also believed that humans could have more than one type of intelligence at a time and learn to attain their desired type of intelligence through training.
Why does this concern us?
Understanding the different types of intelligence provides major insights into how human brains work.
The human capacity to achieve specific goals can be tuned to match the talent of the individuals. Individuals can use this knowledge to learn more about themselves and use their strengths to their advantage to do great things.
On the other hand, the stereotype of intelligence often pointed to academic success will be broken as academic success will be considered as one of the types of intelligence instead of the only definition of success.
Young talents can be spotted and groomed in different fields such as football, history, biology, fashion, and so on as all these disciplines are vital to our society.
Acknowledging the different types of intelligence will also make the society a more accepting one, becoming more open about accepting people with different types of intelligence just as they are slowly starting to accept people with mental health issues.
What will this mean for the next generation?
The exposure towards these types of intelligence will provide parents with different perspectives to raise their children.
The next generation parents can skip the pain of expecting their children to do things they are not capable of. This will prevent emotional discontent between parents and children.
Other than that, schools can also employ standard teaching methods that will cater to the different types of intelligence.
Teaching is only considered successful if the students understand what is taught, however, the teachers are struggling to cater to individual needs of students as they have different learning styles.
By identifying them according to these types, schools can come up with universal teaching methods that can be tested, improvised and supervised by the administration.
Workplace dynamics will also be heavily impacted by this knowledge as more companies will be conscious about employing staffs with the right type of intelligence for the jobs instead of taking chances.
Jobs would be more fun as people will be happy doing them, which subsequently increases the overall productivity and job satisfaction.
Therefore, the only concern of the employers is to properly compensate their workers as their employees will be automatically gaining them profits.
Conclusion
Embracing differences is what we have been doing all along, especially since Malaysia is a melting pot of many cultures and people.
Understanding the different types of intelligence will help us understand ourselves better and make way to appreciate different disciplines as well.
Society needs everyone to flourish therefore we need to make sure that people can unlock and achieve their greatest potential, sharpening their natural talents.
Venturing into understanding human nature should also be appreciated as human minds are very fascinating.
Exploring the different types of intelligence is slowly nudging towards a greater effort in understanding humans’ full mental potential.
A peak physical body is capable of doing many incredible things, including surviving extreme weathers and running a marathon in under 2 hours as Eliud Kipchoge did. However, the full capability of a human mind still remains a mystery that is up to us to unravel.
The author is from the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
- Focus Malaysia.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.